Maria Gowen (or Gowan) Brooks (pen name, A Lover of Fine Arts and María Del Occidente; 1794 – November 11, 1845)[1] was an American poet.

She impressed Edgar Allan Poe and the English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who promoted her best-known poem Zophiël.

In the hopes of earning some income, in 1820 Brooks published her first collection of poetry, Judith, Esther, and other Poems,[3] under the pseudonym "A Lover of Fine Arts".

During this time, she began to write the poem she would become most famous for: Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven, based on the story of Sara in the Book of Tobit.

In 1826, Brooks began a correspondence with the English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who praised her work heartily and gave her the pseudonym "María Del Occidente" (Maria of the West).

However, in the same year, she visited Paris, and there met the Marquis de Lafayette, a man renowned for his heroic services in the American Revolutionary War.

In 1843, she serially published a "prose account of her unhappy love affair", called Idomen; or, the Vale of Yumuri, in a Boston newspaper.