PLAYA ALUMNI

Molly Reid’s debut collection of stories, The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary, won the seventh annual BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published by BOA Editions in May of 2019. The collection was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for...

Confrontational and uncanny, KS Brewer’s research-based, interdisciplinary work deciphers the machinations of insidious trauma as cultural perpetuations of power hierarchies and even as a defining feature of our current human consciousness. Through experiential and...

Katerie Gladdys is a transdisciplinary artist who thinks about place, marginalized landscapes, sustainability, mapping, consumption, and agriculture, creating installations, interactive, sculpture, video, and relational performances. Recent partners in collaboration...

Vanessa Blakeslee's latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories is the winner of the Foreword Reviews’ 2018 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Short Stories (Gold), the 2019 IPPY Silver Medal for Short Story Fiction (Silver), the NIEA (Gold), and was a Chicago Tribune...

Over the last decade,  Nicole Jean Hill has photographed a diverse range of subject matter centered in Humboldt County, California, including mixed martial arts fight culture, landscapes and detritus from public lands, and animals being captured and tracked by...

Casey Merkle is a nature-culture-sustainability researcher from the Rhode Island School of Design, an educator, and artist studying the multidisciplinary use of mental mapping for community engagement, cartography, and storytelling. Her research dives into water...

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian,...

Aidan Patrick Welby is an artist practicing sculpture. Through a deep commitment to language, Welby creates appositional works that redefine and recenter places within the American landscape. Earthworks, objects, photographs, and writings compose a portfolio bound by...

Tallmadge Doyle is painter, printmaker, educator and public artist who’s work reflects on pressing issues of climate change. Born in New York City now based in Eugene Oregon, she received her BFA from the Cleveland Art Institute and an MFA from University of Oregon....

Elvina Scott is a mother, writer, and ultramarathon runner. She has two children, one of whom is disabled and has intractable epilepsy. This parenting experience informs her writing and advocacy work. She is writing a memoir about parenting and caregiving a radically...

Laura Gibson is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, video-maker and writer based both in Oregon and New York City. She’s released five full-length records and various collaborative music, film, performance and writing projects. She currently releases music...

Framed by fragility, impermanence, and possibility, Christina Conklin’s artwork and writing consider our cultural responses to the compounding ecological and social crises of our time. She has an MFA from California College of the Arts, and her book on climate change...

Ingrid Taylor is a poet, science writer, and veterinarian whose work often deals with inherited trauma, land degradation, and our connections to our more-than-human kin. Her poetry has recently appeared in the Southwest Review, the Ocotillo Review, FERAL: A Journal of...

Karen Klinedinst a Baltimore, Maryland-based artist using photography to explore themes of place, nature and the environment. Inspired by 19th century landscape paintings of the Hudson River School and 19th century photo processes, she creates richly layered images...

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Navigation, 40 Weeks, Breaking, and most recently, Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture. Her newest collection,...

A biologist gone rogue, Anneke Wilder’s visual art is based in a desire to communicate the astonishing intricacies and complexity of life on earth, inspire curiosity and reflection, and cultivate devotion to our human and nonhuman communities. Originally from rural...

David Naimon is a writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Orion, Tin House, AGNI, and EcoTheo among many other places. He is co-author of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing and hosts the literary podcast Between...

Mary Beth Coyne’s work and passion for the mountains has taken her to wild and remote places to practice architecture – locations have spanned a spectrum from Kodiak to Tokyo, Wyoming to San Francisco. She created her architecture practice in 2016, to more directly...

As a child, McKenzie Floyd often traveled with her mother, Bets Cole, on plein air painting excursions. Raised in the Willamette Valley, OR, she has since lived in California, DC, Idaho, Italy, and Scotland. She has come to know each of these places intimately through...

Bets Cole has spent the majority of her artistic career traveling and painting throughout the US and Europe in the plein air tradition. In the open air she studies the ever-changing landscape, recording both its vastness and its details. She is known for her...

Ingrid Wendt was born and raised in Aurora, Illinois, of German-speaking parents—a Chilean-born father and a Michigan-born mother—she earned an MFA in Writing from the University of Oregon, where she served as Managing Editor of Northwest Review. Her first book of...

Julia Hands is an editor and writer from Seattle. A Washington local, she grew up in the Seattle-area and earned her MFA in creative writing at Western Washington University. Maybe because she has always circled around where she grew up, as a writer she’s interested...

Hailing from rural Northern California, Amanda Thomas is a visual artist working in photography, painting, sculpture, video and sound. She works in the Art Department of the College of the Siskiyous, and is an Art Studio student at the University of California, Davis....

Michael Boonstra is a visual artist based in Oregon whose creative practice shifts between drawing, photography, installation, and sculpture. He is a founding member of Gray Space, a group of Oregon artists based in the Corvallis, Eugene and Roseburg areas who came...