About Maia

Maia Williams moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, from Charlotte, North Carolina, for a “year of living creatively,” in 2011. All these years later, she and her husband are still here — a familiar San Miguel story.

The common threads throughout Maia’s career have been building community, growing businesses, supporting social justice efforts and the arts. With Wild Muse workshops, journeys, and now publishing, the adventure continues.

Soon after arriving, Maia volunteered with the international San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival. Named co-director in 2014, she implemented programming, marketing, and sponsorship initiatives that led to record growth in attendance and revenue. It was also an opportunity to work with notable poets and writers, including Gloria Steinem, David Ebershoff, Cheryl Strayed, Laura Esquivel, Lawrence Hill, Ben Sáenz, Naomi Klein, David Whyte, Rita Dove, Kirk Ellis, Ellen Bass, Jennifer Clement, Richard Blanco, Merilyn Simonds, Alfredo Corchado, Mary Karr, Tommy Orange, Alison Wright, and Billy Collins.

In 2015 and 2017, Maia founded Poetry Café and Prose Café, two popular, ongoing reading series for local and visiting writers, and launched Crossroads, San Miguel’s annual bilingual arts and culture magazine, serving as editor-in-chief from 2015 through 2020.

Wild Muse Show Up & Write! workshops, offered first in March 2015, have grown to include year-round in-person and online courses for writers of short-form creative nonfiction. With the anthology, Memory as Muse: Then and Now, Wild Muse Press was born.

Prior to living much of the year in Mexico, Maia topped off her U.S. career in business as CEO of a sales and management consulting firm in the Carolinas, growing annual client revenues from $500 to $750 million over five years. She volunteered across North Carolina as an advocate for creative arts organizations, including a multiyear term on the board of Charlotte’s renown Arts & Science Council and as annual fundraising chair for The Echo Foundation, an educational organization focused on social justice, with strong ties to the late Elie Wiesel, humanitarian, literary icon, and Nobel peace laureate.