About
Who is she?
A novelist, poet, speaker, mentor, mother, history nerd and professional collector of strange rocks. Mostly she’s someone trying to be fully human on purpose, and taking notes.
True things
She writes poems on her bedroom, bathroom and hallway walls in marker, and some of them are older than the paint around them.
There’s a pink chair in her room holding a pink skeleton, a sloth, a dragon egg and a toy sword.
Her manuscript gets weighed down with stones, a pinecone and an articulated dragon.
She falls asleep in meadows.
She’s very afraid of fire and walks into it anyway.
Her dogs are Atlas and Luna.
She studied history because she’s always been suspicious of who gets to decide what gets remembered.
She can spend years building an entire fantasy world and still write the important sentence on the nearest scrap of paper.
She is equally capable of turning grief into a poem and abandoning the poem because a dog, a bug, a strange rock or something ridiculous became more interesting.
What does it mean to be human, and how the fuck do we do it without abandoning ourselves or each other?
What I believe
Being alive comes with responsibility.
I believe our liberation is tangled up together, which means I can’t talk about sovereignty while ignoring the systems that take it from other people.
I believe Black lives matter. Trans lives matter. Palestinian lives matter. The people of Congo and Sudan matter. Indigenous sovereignty matters. Bodily autonomy matters. Reproductive freedom matters. Disabled people deserve lives built around dignity rather than accommodation as an afterthought.
I believe workers deserve dignity, safety, rest and enough money to live. I believe hoarding obscene wealth while people are hungry is a moral failure, regardless of how beautifully capitalism explains it.
I believe patriarchy hurts all of us. White supremacy doesn’t disappear because we become uncomfortable naming it. Colonialism isn’t only something that happened in history books. And systems built by human beings can be dismantled by human beings.
I believe children are people.
I believe survivors get to decide what healing looks like.
I believe bodies belong to the people living inside them.
I believe love without liberation isn’t enough.
I believe spirituality that requires me to stop looking at suffering isn’t spirituality I want.
I believe mindfulness should make us more present to the world, not better at tolerating what should never have been acceptable.
I believe self-mastery without humanity becomes another form of control.
And I believe sovereignty means very little if the only freedom I’m interested in is my own.
Giving back
Here’s where we’re putting our hands.
I don’t want my values to live exclusively in paragraphs on a website.
A portion of my work, money, platform and time has always gone back into people and causes I believe in. This is where I’ll keep a record of that work, the organizations and movements I support, and ways you can help when there is somewhere useful to point our collective attention.
The Human Ledger →For press, organisers and programs
The Official Version
Biography
Nikyla Maria is a novelist, poet, speaker, self-mastery mentor and trauma-certified practitioner whose work explores story, memory, power, embodiment and human sovereignty. She is an advanced energetic surgeon and master healer who has spent more than a decade guiding people through self-discovery, inner-child work, mindfulness and reclamation, including immersive retreats around the world. She is the author of Unearthing: Blood & Bone, Book I of the seven-part dark fantasy series The Frequencies of Eden, and creator of Poetry with a Pulse, where poetry moves beyond the page through voice, sound and performance. Across every form, her work asks some version of the same question: what becomes possible when we stop performing who we were taught to be and remember how to belong to ourselves? She lives with her two teenagers and two dogs, Atlas and Luna, in a house whose walls are slowly becoming a manuscript.
Short biography
Nikyla Maria is a dark fantasy author, poet, speaker and inner child guide. She wrote Unearthing: Blood & Bone, hosts Embodied Divinity, leads retreats, and writes her poems directly onto the walls of her home.
Press & speaking
Built from your doc. The two opening lines under “Who is she?” and the photo captions are my working copy; everything else is your words.