- Maya's second book, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, is now available from the University of Michigan Press! The book can be ordered in paperback, hardcover and ebook, both at the Press's website and on Amazon.com, among other sites.
- Greasepaint Puritan has received critical praise in The Gay & Lesbian Review and Library Journal.
- In the November-December 2024 issue of The G&L Review, Joseph M. Ortiz observed: "Maya Cantu’s meticulously researched biography, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, reveals the extent to which Ropes based his backstage novels on his own Broadway experiences. As much a work of theater history as a biography, Cantu’s impressive book recreates New York’s theatrical scene in the 1920s, a business that provided new opportunities for artistic gay men but that also strictly circumscribed their behavior by forcing them to conceal their sexual identity and bolster the image of straight, middle-class masculinity. Through a sensitive reading of the novels, Cantu shows how Ropes imagined a “queer resistance” to the theater’s inherent homophobia through the figure of the chorus boy: the ubiquitous (and typically gay) Broadway performer who responds to his stigma in the business with a sharp tongue and a “camp” sensibility. No doubt Ropes saw himself as such a figure...One of the many virtues of Cantu’s book is that it serves as a call to rediscover and read Ropes’ backstage novels—not only for what they reveal about the history of American theater, but also for what they reveal about the life of an important gay figure who might otherwise have been forgotten."
- In January of 2024, Library Journal's Genevieve Williams wrote: "This book is part biography of a little-known screenwriter and novelist, part analysis of how biography and art inform one another, and part critique of how art as a commercial product has a way of burying its origins. (The book is) a well-researched and thorough illumination of a writer who deserves to be better known."
- In the November-December 2024 issue of The G&L Review, Joseph M. Ortiz observed: "Maya Cantu’s meticulously researched biography, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, reveals the extent to which Ropes based his backstage novels on his own Broadway experiences. As much a work of theater history as a biography, Cantu’s impressive book recreates New York’s theatrical scene in the 1920s, a business that provided new opportunities for artistic gay men but that also strictly circumscribed their behavior by forcing them to conceal their sexual identity and bolster the image of straight, middle-class masculinity. Through a sensitive reading of the novels, Cantu shows how Ropes imagined a “queer resistance” to the theater’s inherent homophobia through the figure of the chorus boy: the ubiquitous (and typically gay) Broadway performer who responds to his stigma in the business with a sharp tongue and a “camp” sensibility. No doubt Ropes saw himself as such a figure...One of the many virtues of Cantu’s book is that it serves as a call to rediscover and read Ropes’ backstage novels—not only for what they reveal about the history of American theater, but also for what they reveal about the life of an important gay figure who might otherwise have been forgotten."
- In February and March of 2024, Maya appeared on "Broadway Nation," where she discussed Greasepaint Puritan with host David Armstrong. He introduced the episode: "(42nd Street is) just the first of (Ropes's) three long-forgotten novels that include Stage Mother and Go Into Your Dance, all of which were inspired by Ropes’s own experiences as a performer, and all three of which give us a chance to go backstage on Broadway during the 1920s and experience the lives of gay men in show business. As you will hear, Maya Cantu has done a miraculous job of uncovering all of this."
The podcast can be listened to in three parts: "Episode 133: 42nd Street and the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes;" "Episode 134: Before Gypsy There Was Stage Mother: The Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, Part 2;" and "Episode 135: Go Into Your Dance: The Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, Part 3." - In May 2024, Maya was among the keynote speakers of "Stagestruck! 2024: Nostalgia and the Hollywood Musical," presented at the Great American Songbook Foundation in Carmel, Indiana.
- With Broadway choreographer and director Randy Skinner (42nd Street, Dames at Sea) and WNET Senior Writer Elisa Lichtenbaum, Maya appeared on February 10 as part of the "42nd Street: Dancing from Novel to Screen to Stage" panel at the Museum of Broadway, where she also read excerpts from Greasepaint Puritan.
- For a Q&A for the University of Michigan Press's blog, Maya answered questions about Greasepaint Puritan and what inspired her to write about the life and work of Bradford Ropes.
- Maya presented the 2022 Convocation speech at Bennington College, where she teaches on the Drama faculty. The video can be found here, with Maya appearing at around the 43 minute mark.
- Maya's essay, "Double Lives: On Louise Brooks's Thirteen Women in Films," on Brooks's unpublished feminist film criticism, was published in August 2020 at the Los Angeles Review of Books. The essay was also featured in The Daily's "August Books" at the Criterion Collection.
- Maya was selected as the 2020 recipient of the American Theatre and Drama Society’s Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award for her essay, “Beyond the Rue Pigalle: Recovering Ada 'Bricktop' Smith as 'Muse,' Mentor and Maker of Transatlantic Musical Theatre,” published in Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity (ed. Sarah Whitfield, Red Globe Press/Springer Nature Ltd. 2019).
- Maya's book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy, was published by Palgrave Macmillan/Springer in 2015, as part of the Studies in Theater and Performance History series. The book is available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, as well as at the following libraries. American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage has enjoyed positive recognition in Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre Survey, The Journal of American Culture, New England Theatre Journal, and Theatre Annual.