PLAYA Alumni

Sue Ann Higgens is a writer and educator from the Pacific Northwest. She works in fiction, lyrical prose and poetry and hopes to add joy and exuberant observation to the world.

Minka Wallace is a Portland-based artist, educator, and activist. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at Portland State University in 2005 and will finish a Masters in Education from Concordia in 2020. In 2012 she founded the Olivia Darlings a landbased synchronized...

Abigail R. Dockter is a writer and researcher based in Tucson, Arizona. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and has done botany and archaeology work from the high plains to the Southwest. She has facilitated workshops in both academic...

Izzy Cho is an interdisciplinary artist with a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Oregon in 2019. Cho focuses on representing the domestic space within a personal Korean-American landscape. Exhibitions include BFA thesis show “In Plain Sight” and solo show “I...

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, where he has taught writing since 1979. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures...

David Poulshock is a Northwest filmmaker whose projects have won over 90 awards, including 9 national Telly Awards in 2015 alone. His work includes TV commercials and corporate films; the best-selling WEE SING series for Universal Home Video; the groundbreaking public...

Allyn Gaestel is a writer interested in human dignity and complexity. Her home is in Lagos, Nigeria. She works internationally. She has published widely. She also makes photographs and has exhibited internationally.

Susan Charnley is a Research Social Scientist with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon. As an environmental anthropologist, her research focuses on natural resource use and management among rural producers, and the...

Kelly Grogan received her MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles with a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Tishman Review, The Forge, Blue Earth Review, and Reed Magazine, among others, and was nominated for a...

I have been thinking about Nothing since I was six. I have never been thrown from a horse, but I have been bitten by angry creatures and clonked by a coupla flying objects. I am in love with meadows, maps, etymology, the moon. Poet, Wanderer, Homemaker, Listener,...

Ellen Adams writes essays, fiction and songs. As a teenager in Eastern Washington, one of her earliest jobs included Spanish interpretation at a cardiology clinic. Ferrying the conditions of patients’ figurative and anatomical hearts between languages confirmed for...

Elizabeth McLagan is the author of the poetry collections In The White Room (2013) and My Rothko, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, L.A. Review, 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has won an AWP...

Lisa Wells is an augur and performance artist living in Corvallis, Oregon. Her multimedia work mixes meditation, movement, videography, still photography, drawing and writing to create stories about place and people within place. She has a PhD in geology and has...

Artist MaryAnn Puls, creates paintings, drawings and assemblages in various mediums. Her work follows its own script with results that seem familiar, enigmatically attractive and although abstract, projects a certain reality. A need to understand draws the viewer to...

Martha Silano is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), What the Truth Tastes Like (Two Sylvias Press, 2015), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception,...

Paper, ink, beeswax, and thread tell the story of a place in Marilyn Joyce’s mixed-media works. Residing in Portland, Oregon, her interest in the natural world, joined with a walking practice, provide parameters for her art. Direct observation combined with felt...

As an artist, I curate information collecting images, textures and forms, physically and in my mind’s eye as I move through this world. In my current art practice I use fiber and mixed media to depict abstracted landscapes, obscuring and controlling viewpoints...

Daniel Mayer is an Arizona artist, educator, and fine press publisher who investigates the intersection of language and art resulting in artist’s books, experimental prints, and award-winning public art. Mayer’s personal studio works are a fusion of cultural identity,...

South African. MA Social Sculpture 2007. Member Galley 114 Co-op. Collaborations include GPSEN- Think Tank, SSRU- Agents of Change. Visual Art Practice Exhibited SA, USA, UK.

Lola is a creative producer and writer who has an intense fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments. The intersection of art, food, the environment, and public engagement is her favorite place to linger. She has...

Richie is an archaeologist who specializes in the first peoples of the Great Basin, with a particular focus on Oregon. Specifically, he studies stone tool technology, organization, and chronology to inform on broader cultural and social patterns, diversity, and...

Katelyn McDonough is pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation research bridges ecological and anthropological approaches to investigate how plant communities and human diets have changed over the past 13,000 years. Katelyn’s work...

Ingrid L. Taylor is veterinarian, writer, and poet who lives in Las Vegas with her Newfoundland dog, Winston, and her black cat, Olive. Her fiction has appeared Dies Infaustus, Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women, Gaia: Shadow...