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]