Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who served as Portland, ME's seventh poet laureate for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Eir debut full length poetry collection Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023) was selected as a finalist for a New England Book Award. Their second full length poetry collection, Refused a Second Date (Harbor Editions, 2023), was selected as a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. They won two chapbook prizes: What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? won Garden Party Collective's Chapbook Prize in 2024 selected by mónica teresa ortiz; and Feminine Morbidity won The Headlight Review's Chapbook Prize selected by Olatunde Osinaike in 2025. Maya is also proud to have contributed prose to venues such as Sacred & Subversive, The Rumpus, Black Girl Nerds, LGBTQ Nation, The Daily Beast, Honey Literary, Talk Death, and more. Maya was listed as The Advocate’s Champions of Pride in 2022, won the Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize from the Maine Humanities Council in 2024, and received the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection Creative Fellowship in 2025.