about Maria

Maria Raha is a writer, an editor, a creative professional, and a podcaster. After graduating from Ithaca College with a B.S. in Communications, she moved to New York City and began working in advertising and production for magazines including Time Out New York, Vibe, Spin, and Blaze. Maria also began contributing written content to publications such as Oculus, Bitch, Swingset (for which she was also managing editor), and other independent publications. She contributed to her first nonfiction anthology, Young Wives’ Tales: True Adventures in Love and Partnership (Seal Press), in 2001 and to Laura Flanders’ anthology The W Effect: Bush’s War on Women (Feminist Press) in 2004.  

Maria published her first full-length nonfiction book, Cinderella’s Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground (Seal Press), in 2005 and her second full-length book, Hellions: Pop Culture’s Rebel Women (Seal Press), in 2008. Hellions won the Pop Culture Association’s Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women’s Studies that year.

After a decade in magazine publishing, Maria moved to Philadelphia, where she began a career as an editor at Temple University and continued contributing to nonfiction anthologies, including Madonna and Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop (Catapult, 2012) and Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Work of Joe Strummer (Routledge , 2015). During her career at Temple, she served as editor, senior editor, director of content strategy, and director of creative strategy. 

In 2018, Maria joined University of the Arts as AVP for marketing. In that role, she continued working on publications and digital assets of all kinds; transformed the university’s brand presence and editorial voice; and built a strong and highly talented, 10-person creative team over her five and a half years there. She also began collaborating with Greg Caputo and Jason Schell on Dumbline, a podcast about the mistakes criminals make that lead to their downfall, in 2022.