About Maxima

About
Maxima

Click here for my press kit

Welcome!

I’m Maxima Kahn. I am so glad your found your way here.

I am a published poet and writer, award-winning musician and dancer, soul guide, firekeeper, and Empress of Play.
I have studied creativity and the creative process in depth for decades. I have uncovered how creative people get stuck, how we free ourselves, how we summon inspiration and keep our creativity flowing, and how we hone our gifts into our most powerful, authentic expression. I have delved deep into how we recognize our true heart dreams and bring them to fruition step-by-step through processes both deeply practical and magical.

Along the way, I have learned a wealth of powerful, contemporary, transformational modalities for personal healing and inner freedom and for creating fulfilling, joyful lives. I combine these with my immersion in ancient indigenous wisdom and contemporary devotion to the Divine feminine.

Out of all this, I crafted my own unique IMAGINE Dreamtending process for unlocking your creativity, discovering your unique gifts, and co-creating with life to realize your heart’s true dreams. My students have called this system “revolutionary” and “life-changing.”

My courses and one-on-one Creative Life Mentoring have helped hundreds of people to free their creativity, hone their unique gifts, and follow their heart path.

What you’ll find here:

To learn more about my personal credo, read:

What I know & 3 Mantras to Live By

Experience:

WRITER

I am writer of poetry, fiction and essays. My work has been featured in numerous literary journals, including the Louisville Review, Wisconsin Review, Euphony, Sweet, Poem, and many others, and on popular blogs, such as Tiny Buddha, Positively Positive, Better Humans, and The Creative Penn. I have twice been nominated for Best of the Net, was a finalist for the Atlanta Review poetry contest, and have received fellowships and scholarships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers. I have taught poetry and creative writing at the University of California, Davis Extension and worked as an editor and writing coach for writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

My first full-length collection of poems, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020 and was a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Book Award.

MUSICIAN

I am an award-winning composer and avant-garde violinist. and have performed with such groups as the Relentless Compassion Orchestra, the Tiny Monsters, and Sawbones.

DANCER

As a dancer, my primary love is Contact Improvisation, which I have taught for many years. I studied dance-movement therapy at the Naropa Institute, as well as many forms of dance and somatic modalities, including Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering. I also create and perform regularly with the dance-music-theater troupe Shadow Cabinet. An understanding of deep body-intelligence and whole body learning is vital to all of my teaching.

FIREKEEPER

All of my work and play is deeply infused with ancient, heart-centered teachings. I am an initiated Firekeeper and have been a student of the profound, practical wisdom of an authentic, indigenous path since 2000.

Receive behind-the-scenes access to my art and creative process, my regular posts about the joys and challendges of living as an artist in the world, and my popular What’s Inspiring Me posts at Patreon.com/MaximaKahn.
You get all kinds of cool rewards. I share my best and most vulnerable writing there, most of it exclusive to Patreon, and you get to see new creations long before anyone else. All for a few dollars a month. Check it out!

A wee bit more about my life:

I am the child of two philosophy professors, Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, so I grew up asking big questions, delving into the meaning and working of life. I was also a deeply-feeling and dreamy kid. As a child, I created songs, danced, made up plays, made visual art, wrote poems and stories, sang in a chorus, studied photography, and lived in the realm of the imagination.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.

– John Keats

I have hitchhiked across country, worked as a diner waitress, built my own home, and generally lived a radical life.

The challenges and losses in my own life led me to find deep healing, extraordinary tools for transformation and inner freedom, and a life-giving relationship with my creativity. They also led me to study with a shaman from the Huichol tradition for 22 years, which developed into my becoming initiated as a firekeeper. All of which led to my teaching and inspiring others to be fully alive and expressed.

My poems and writing explore and express the wild realms of imagination, emotion, and spirit, while probing often-unanswerable questions. I seek to give voice to the voiceless, speech to the unsayable, and make the invisible visible, as in the words of the artist Paul Klee…

 

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.

Land Acknowledgment and Values

I acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded homelands of the Nisenan people, the indigenous stewards of this land, who still live among us today.

Brilliant Playground is a space of inclusion and honoring for people of all colors, races, paths, genders, abilities, and sexual preferences. You are welcome here!

I tithe 10% of my income to causes I believe in, which include the arts, care of the environment, women & girls, racial & social justice, preserving indigenous wisdom, and helping communities & populations in need.