WINNER OF THE GIVAL PRESS POETRY AWARD
MARCH 2019

"Meteor pierces the psyche with a dazzling presence and otherworldly light. Mayo delights in the pleasures of language and the possibilities of imagination. By leveling a playfully skeptical voice that is wholly her own, she transforms the quotidian into the outlandish while making the bizarre seem familiar and inviting. Through her inexorable wit and endless inventiveness, Mayo crafts the most unusual work—a book that is both challenging and fun to read."
—Linwood D. Rumney, Author of Abandoned Earth

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"The first thing we notice while reading C.M. Mayo is her motion, her flow, silk—line after line summoning us through story. This gift can't be manufactured. It comes from a writer, seasoned and smart, with something to say and the literary confidence to say it. I believe this is Mayo's best work—perfect words without artifice; characters and situations made permanent; a triumph of language as a natural art. She brings flowers to the living."
—Grace Cavalieri
"The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress"

“C.M. Mayo creates magic, in poems that transform the ordinary into something more marvelous and strange. Whether describing a haircut by the wife of 'the man who mows the lawn around the nuclear warheads,’ or feuding with the neighborhood squirrels over ownership rights to nuts, or commenting on the commercialization of services in the long poem ‘I Will,’ Mayo transforms the quotidian into something magnificent, until—as she says in the title poem—‘No one would believe me/No one would believe any of this.’ Meteor is a delight and an astonishment.”
— Kim Roberts

"Whether describing a nuclear childhood of military bases with UFOs, the assasination of a hippopotamus or chaos in the ‘hood, these poems of memory and imagination bring to life the back stories of our delirious times. To be savored."
— Bruce Berger

"Funny and thoughtful, Meteor collects effective narrative poems"
— Foreword Magazine

C.M. Mayo is the author of several books of literary fiction and nonfiction, including The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (a Library Journal Best Book of 2009), Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (winner of the Indie Excellence Award for History), and Sky Over El Nido: Stories, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have been widely published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, among them, Beltway Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Southwest Review, and the anthologies edited by Robert L. Giron, Poetic Voices Without Borders and Poetic Voices Without Borders 2. In 2017 Mayo was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. A native of El Paso, Texas, raised in Palo Alto, California and educated at the University of Chicago, she lives in Mexico City.
www.cmmayo.com

Interview: Leslie Pietrzyk's Work-in-Progress Blog, January 21, 2019
Noodling: Meteor, Influences, Ambiance, Madam Mayo blog, December 3, 2018

SKY OVER EL NIDO
BY C.M. MAYO
WINNER, FLANNERY O'CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

"A remarkable literary debut... tautly fashioned prose, alive with myriad turns of phrase as on-target as they are idiosyncratic."
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"C.M. Mayo writes some of the most exquisitely fashioned, perfectly measured prose alive in the world today. Her stories glitter with delicious odd details. They feel electrically charged, richly mysterious, and rhythmic. I love her layering of cultures, her offbeat humor, her potent instinct for voices. Bravo! Captivating! Yes, yes, yes!"
Naomi Shihab Nye