How Maya Stein is taking over the poetry world

Have you seen poet and creative entrepreneur Maya Stein yet? She's a poet and a writer who went on a road trip as the "Type Rider." Now she has a following and a weekly writing group on Facebook. I'll look at how a journey can kickstart your author platform.

Maybe a year ago I found about Maya when my father sent me a link to a newspaper article about her. At that point she was literally riding across the country on her bike, with a typewriter in tow. Why? She says:

"On May 5, 2012, on the day I turned 40, I set out by bicycle from Amherst, Massachusetts and rode for 40 days and more than 1,200 miles to Milwaukee, Wisconsin toting a typewriter behind me. Along the way, I stopped in communities, set up a mobile typing booth, and invited people to contribute their words to a growing poem."

Did your jaw drop when you realized just how awesome that is? Maya! You are an inspiration!

She finished the ride a while back, but she's building a new project called "Tuesday Typists" through her Facebook Fan Page. I'm happy to be one of the hundreds of poets around the country writing off of a prompt she posts on Tuesday morning. It's an extension of her long-standing 10 Line Tuesday project, that you can read about on her website. And she's writing on Huffington Post, as the resident ninja poet. Awesome.

And inspirational. What I think we can all take from Maya's work as a poet is that she is taking her writing, staying true to the creative spirit, and expanding her online author platform in the process. She tied her writing to traveling, to blogging, to workshops, and to her weekly poetry practice.

Does what she's doing get you excited about doing something new with your own writing to build your author platform?

Image source: MayaStein.com