PLAYA Alumni

Paul Skenazy grew up in Chicago, studied at the University of Chicago and Stanford, and taught Literature and Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He reviewed fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Chicago Tribune and other...

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian-American writer in Santa Cruz, CA. She is cofounder of the Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. Her poetry and prose appears or is...

Nancy Floyd has been an exhibiting artist for over thirty years. She has received many notable awards including a 2018 Aaron Siskind Photography Fellowship (New York, NY), a 2016-17 CUE Art Foundation Fellowship (New York, NY), a 2015-16 Society for Photographic...

Aaron is a Vancouver-based writer who focuses on young adult fiction for ages fourteen and up. He won the CANSCAIP (Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers) Writing for Children Competition and was a finalist for Hunger Mountain’s Katherine...

Rachel Maxi has been making art in Seattle since arriving here in 1990 from Cincinnati, Ohio where she attended Xavier University. Her work has been shown and collected widely publicly and privately throughout the NorthWest and featured in both the Seattle and Tacoma...

Lisa Conrad is a visual artist, writer, and digital scholarship librarian at California College of the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been shown in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Baltimore. She received her BA from Bennington...

Lauren Bierly (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, and an arts administrator. Bierly has exhibited in New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Kolkata, India. She was artist-in-residence at chaNorth (2018); Starry Night (2017); Panoply Performance Lab...

Emily Meg Weinstein’s work has appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Longreads, Climbing, Rock and Ice, Electric Literature, The Billfold, The Hairpin, The Huffington Post, and other publications and anthologies. Her essay, “Mating Habits of the Asterisk,” was...

Casey Plett wrote the novel Little Fish, the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love, and co-edited the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. She is a winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ALA Stonewall Book...

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,...