Maria Cichosz is a writer and scholar of post-1945 literature, art, theory, and the history of ideas. She applies these frameworks to the study of drug histories and cultures.

Her work has appeared in Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Puritan, and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist, among other places. Her first novel, Cam & Beau (2020), is an off-beat gonzo love story that was featured in The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Puritan, and The Rumpus, and was a semifinalist for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Awards. Her second novel, Middlemen, is represented by the Ballpoint Literary Agency. As a practicing editor, Maria serves as Fiction and Reviews Editor at Broken Pencil magazine and Associate Book Reviews Editor at The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs journal. 

Maria received her PhD from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought & Literature, where she was also a Humanities & Sciences Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research has been supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mellon Foundation.

Maria is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and serves as Director of the Victoria College Writing Centre. 

She is deep at work on a new novel with the generous assistance of a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant.

You can visit Maria’s University of Toronto faculty page here.