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**Note:** Since no RAG context was provided with specific author/book details, I have executed this brief using a **SAMPLE fictional author** (Maya Chen / *The Cartography of Silence*) to demonstrate the exact tone, structure, and word counts required. Replace all bracketed elements with actual credentials from your RAG source.
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## SHORT BIO (50 words)
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Maya Chen writes unflinching literary fiction that interrogates the physics of grief. *The Cartography of Silence* traces a terminally ill cartographer who maps Detroit’s abandoned industrial spaces as her memory collapses from a rare neurological condition. Chen holds an MFA from Iowa and lives in Detroit, where she restores 1960s typewriters.
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## MEDIUM BIO (150 words)
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Maya Chen has spent fifteen years documenting the ways cities forget their own histories. Her novel, *The Cartography of Silence*, follows a cartographer racing to archive disappearing Rust Belt landmarks before dementia erases her own past—a narrative Chen constructed from oral histories with Detroit factory workers and salvaged mill blueprints.
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A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Chen previously worked as an urban archivist, collecting photographs and ephemera from foreclosed homes. That archive now lives in the Smithsonian’s collection. She writes at the intersection of architecture and amnesia, exploring how brick and mortar hold stories when biological memory fails.
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When not writing, Chen refurbishes vintage typewriters in her live/work warehouse in Detroit’s North End. She is currently completing a second novel about the women who riveted the Ambassador Bridge.
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## LONG BIO (300 words)
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Maya Chen first understood the fragility of memory while watching her grandmother chart decaying Baghdad neighborhoods from exile in Dearborn, tracing streets on napkins with a precision that contradicted her creeping dementia. Those hybrid maps—geographically inaccurate but emotionally true—became the seed of *The Cartography of Silence*, a novel that interrogates what remains when official archives systematically erase working-class existence.
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For fifteen years, Chen worked as an urban archivist, legally salvaging photographs, pay stubs, and handwritten letters from homes foreclosed during the 2008 crisis. This material now forms the Smithsonian’s largest collection of post-industrial ephemera, and provided the historical backbone for her protagonist, a terminally ill cartographer racing to document Detroit’s vanishing landmarks before her own memory collapses. The novel braids this medical narrative with the city’s physical architecture—specifically the hulking Packard Plant and the rusted spans of the Ambassador Bridge—to explore how concrete and steel hold stories that human minds cannot.
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Chen holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her nonfiction has appeared in *Harper’s* and *The Believer*, examining the collision of urban decay and institutional memory. She approaches fiction as an archaeological act, unearthing the lives of women whose labor built the infrastructure we traverse daily but whose names never entered history books.
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Currently, she lives in a former axle factory in Detroit’s North End, where she restores 1960s typewriters and hosts oral history salons for displaced automotive workers. She is completing her second novel, which traces the riveting crews who constructed the bridge between Detroit and Windsor in 1929.
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## FIRST-PERSON "ABOUT ME" (100 words)
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I write about the ghosts that live in concrete. When I’m not scavenging through abandoned houses for other people’s photographs, I’m grease-deep in the guts of a 1963 Olivetti, trying to make the return key unstick. *The Cartography of Silence* started with my grandmother’s hand-drawn maps of a Baghdad she could no longer visit—maps she drew while losing her memory to dementia. I wanted to understand how we archive what’s disappearing, whether it’s industrial cities or human minds. I live in Detroit, in a warehouse that used to manufacture axles, where the walls still hum with machinery songs.
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## SOCIAL HANDLE BIOS
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**Twitter/X (160 chars):**
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Writes about rust, memory, and the women history forgot. Author of THE CARTOGRAPHY OF SILENCE (@Publisher). Dir. of the Detroit Typewriter Hospital. She/her.
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**Instagram (150 chars):**
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Writes about architectural memory & loss 🏭
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Author: THE CARTOGRAPHY OF SILENCE
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Restoring 1960s typewriters in Detroit
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Currently: mapping abandoned spaces
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**LinkedIn (220 chars):**
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MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Author of THE CARTOGRAPHY OF SILENCE (Publisher), literary fiction exploring urban archives & neurological memory loss. Former urban archivist, Smithsonian contributor. Detroit-based.
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## AUTHOR PHOTO CAPTION
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Maya Chen in her Detroit studio, surrounded by vintage typewriters and aerial maps of the Packard Plant.
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## MEDIA CONTACT BLOCK
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**Maya Chen**
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Email: press@mayachenwrites.com
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Phone: (313) 555-0147
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Website: www.mayachenwrites.com
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Social: @mayachen (Twitter/X/Instagram/Threads)
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