About Maia

Maia started life as an artsy, indoorsy kid in a family of outdoorsy adventurers in the rainy Pacific Northwest. The forced proximity to mud in her formative years deeply impacted Maia’s affection for fantastical stories featuring creatures and cryptids of all kinds. Her dream is to create books for kids and teens that center queer characters and which imagine kinder, wilder, brighter worlds. 

Maia has been making comics since she discovered their existence at age ten through a chance encounter with a newspaper. Maia’s comics span multiple genres, including memoir, graphic medicine, and fiction of many flavors. Her work often focuses on themes of curiosity, transformation, imagination, and belonging. Maia’s educational comics have been published both on and off the web, incorporated into high school and university curricula, and included in library collections around the world. A scientific journal on LGBTQ worldmaking stated that ”no single zine on asexuality has had a larger influence on asexual visibility” than Maia’s Taking the Cake: An Illustrated Primer on Asexuality, which Maia self-published in 2012.

Maia is currently working on a middle grade graphic novel set in Iceland that weaves together subarctic ecology, fiber arts, and Icelandic folklore to tell a story about fairytales, family, and feelings.

Maia holds a Master of Education and has been working with kids of all ages for over a decade. In 2025 she earned an MFA in Cartooning at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Maia now lives in a tiny New England town in a house full of fellow cartoonists, where she brews huge pots of soup and bakes endless cavalcades of muffins like some kind of low-powered kitchen witch.

You can contact her at sparklemaia.art@gmail.com.