Hello! My name is Maya Weeks. I am a climate justice geographer and poet. My interdisciplinary, mixed-methods work focuses on oceans, pollution, and land stewardship. A more detailed biography of mine is below.
Photo: Kris Daum.
Plastic pollution on the west coast of Sweden. Photo: Maya Weeks.
Dr. Maya Weeks is a feminist political ecologist and poet who works on climate justice. Her areas of work include oceans, pollution, gender, and Indigenous governance and land stewardship, and she prioritizes interdisciplinary co-produced and community-engaged research for healthy lands and waters. Maya is a lecturer at Rutgers University and visiting researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute. Previously, she served as a California Sea Grant State Fellow and the Director of Outreach and Development at the California Public Domain Allottee Association. A first-generation college graduate, Maya earned her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz; her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (English) from Mills College; and her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine plastic pollution from a feminist environmental justice perspective using qualitative and creative methods funded by a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship at Bodega Marine Laboratory. Her first book, Myth of the Garbage Patch, was published on THOUSANDS Press in 2026. She is a core member of the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, where she co-leads the Science-Policy Interface Working Group, and she serves on the boards of the American Association of Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and New Cowgirl Camp. She is a settler of Belarusian, Polish, and unknown descent.