Maya Binyam is the 2025-2026 recipient of the John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation "5 under 35" honoree; received the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and was long-listed for the Women's Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
I arrived in Rome desperate to get out of my own head. I was in the midst of a novel draft, spinning my wheels and second guessing everything. I thought I knew what I was doing, and so what I was doing reproduced what I already knew. I was bored with my thoughts and with my routine, which had begun to feel punishing. And then I was thrust completely outside of it. Life at the Academy is busy, hectic, overflowing; I don't have much time to think about my creative decisions outside the moments in which I'm making them, or else my thinking about those decisions becomes subterranean, as I shift my attention toward listening. I've spent many hours writing here; I've also spent many blissful hours during which writing has been far from my mind. I've learned a lot during those periods away, both about my book and about the city in which I find myself; it's been fascinating to be around people who are working and feeling through such varying scales of time, and who know how to decode obscure corners of the region– their knowledge has fortified my curiosity.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
I spend a lot of the day barely understanding what's happening around me, a function of my rudimentary understanding of both the Italian language and Roman history. It's been nice to feel ignorant, like a dunce, or a child – my senses are heightened here, and on the day to day I experience a good deal of wonder. I like existing in that state of confusion and partial disorientation; it's an active state, and requires me to have faith in my impulses, which has translated into a willingness to court the unknown in my own writing. It's embarrassing to try to venture basic thoughts in a language whose vocabulary you barely grasp, but not nearly as embarrassing as pretending you have the capacity to express complex ideas in a language that is supposedly your own. Both modes of expression require a willingness to sound like an idiot, and the redoubling of my idiocy has been emboldening. I've spent a lot of dark, early-morning hours alone in the library, before my self-critical capacities are awake, following the associative logic of my unconscious whims. It's been nice to work so unthinkingly. And very happy-making. My happiness here has been a big influence on my work.
Have any encounters — with people, places, new information — opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
Very early on in the fellowship, when I was still feeling skittish and sort of fearful about the book I was in the midst of drafting, I spoke with Thomas Micchelli, a visiting artist, about his decision some years ago to begin drawing with his non-dominant hand. When I woke up the next morning, I felt like something had shifted; hearing about his experiment with defamiliarization was enough to help me surrender to the experiments I was venturing in my draft. And I've been very moved witnessing the work of Jefferson Pinder, whose streetsweeping performance got me thinking about surrender, too. Katie Ogle is alive to the moment in ways I admire and would like to emulate; her poems, especially the ones about scenes we've witnessed together, have helped me remember that even the annoying parts of life can be interesting. Kevin Martín and Oswald Huỳnh are very attentive to the formal and sonic qualities of language; the questions they asked during my shoptalk with Jefferson helped me feel newly curious about my prose.
What are you hoping to explore or deepen in the remaining months of your residency?
I planned to do archival research in Rome, and was hoping to find materials that, after a long search – and with the help of the wonderful Giulia Barra – I've learned either never existed or have been destroyed. My father lived here in the winter months of 1984 and 1985, while he was waiting for his application for refugee status to the U.S. be processed by the United Nations, and my idea was to try to reconstruct this period in his life – and in the life of a future character – with the support of documentary evidence. But the Catholic charity that housed and fed him has no record of his existence, and he himself has no memory of where he lived, hung out, ate his meals, etc. I had hoped to navigate the city now as he did then, but wandered around aimlessly, without a sense of direction, which for me is always dangerous: I wound up shopping. I spent a lot of time haggling over vintage clothes in flea markets, time that I presumed would have been better spent taking diligent notes in churches or ruins, sites that my father may or may not have visited during his Roman sojourn. But when my father visited in May, claiming to have forgotten the city's most famous monuments, or else to have never seen them, I discovered he had a strange command of the Italian number words that correspond with clothing sizes, and an attendant determination to find a good deal on a jacket. It turned out he had spent many of his days as a would-be colonial subject navigating his would-be colonial metropole shopping for a new wardrobe. I had imagined that he would have been conscious, all those years ago, of the transformations he was undergoing as he was undergoing them, that becoming a refugee after having been a revolutionary would function as a preoccupying change in state. Perhaps it did. But that didn't mean he didn't care about looking good. That's what I like about research. Even when it's accidental, it surfaces life's contradictions.
I only have three weeks left of my residency. This is a long way of saying that I'm planning on having fun.