Maria Hummel

Maria Hummel is an American writer. Her poetry collection, House and Fire, was winner of the 2013 APR/Hickman First Book Prize. She has written five novels: Goldenseal (Counterpoint, 2024), Lesson in Red (Counterpoint, 2021), Still Lives (Counterpoint, 2018), Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin's, 2003).^[1]

Still Lives was the August 2018 pick for the Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club.^[2] Paula L. Woods (Los Angeles Times) called the book "a stunning achievement for a writer who perfectly captures an outsider’s ambivalence about the city’s pluses and minuses, and most notably its sensational crimes and the dark angels we make of its victims."^[3]

Publishers Weekly gave Hummel's novel, Motherland, a starred review and wrote that "Fear, grief, and the will to survive fuse in this beautiful novel about the inner life of a German family in the final months of World War II...."^[4] People wrote that Motherland is "searing and honest, her book illuminates the reality of war away from the front lines ... with a compassion and depth of understanding that will touch your heart.^[5]

Hummel was a Wallace Stegner fellow from 2005 to 2007 at Stanford University, and a Jones Lecturer there from 2009 to 2016. Since 2016, she has taught in the English department at the University of Vermont.^[6]

Works

• Wilderness Run, St Martin's Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-312-28757-3
• Motherland, Counterpoint, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61902-237-9
• Still Lives, Counterpoint, 2018, ISBN 978-1-61902-111-2
• Lesson in Red, Counterpoint, 2021, ISBN 978-1-64009-431-4
• Goldenseal, Counterpoint, 2024, ISBN 978-1-64009-606-6

References