Ramona Maher Weeks Papers

Ramona Maher was born in Phoenix to Josephine and R.E. Maher on October 25, 1934. She had three sisters, Bonnie, Frances, and Hazel. Maher attended schools in Phoenix and Douglas, Arizona, Bedford, Texas, Raton and Clayton, New Mexico, Brinkley, Arkansas, and graduated from high school in Victoria, Texas in 1951. She attended Texas Christian University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and speech in 1954. While at TCU, Maher actively participated in the speech and theater department, appearing in numerous productions, and even staging one of her own one act plays, When the Fire Dies. She also won an award for her poem “The Road to Rome,” which appeared in The American Literary Anthology edited by George Plimpton. In 1954, she worked as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine and won first prize in Seventeen magazine’s short story contest. She married Roberto Martinez and gave birth to her son Ramon. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1957. She later married Tim Weeks. The couple lived in New Mexico, Alaska, Washington, and Arizona.

Maher wrote several young adult novels in the genres of historical fiction and mystery, including Their Shining Hour (1960), The Abracadabra Mystery (1961), A Dime for Romance (1963), The Secret of the Dark Stranger (1963), and The Secret of the Sundial (1966) and non-fiction books Ice Island: Polar Science and the Arctic Research Laboratory (1965) and Shifting Sands: the Story of the Sand Dunes (1968). During her career, she worked as an editor at the University of New Mexico Press, the University of Washington Press, and as an editor and staff writer for the Arizona Teacher, published by the Arizona Education Association. Maher also wrote reviews of juvenile and young adult books for the Arizona Republic newspaper. In 1969, she and Joy Harvey launched a small publishing house called The Baleen Press, and published the poetry journal Inscape. Maher Weeks herself was a prolific and widely published poet. Her poems appeared in the Yale Review, Forum, Descant, the New Mexico Quarterly, the Chicago Review, the Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, and Poetry Northwest among other literary magazines and journals.

Ramona Maher Weeks died in Phoenix on August 19, 1996 at the age of 61.