PLAYA ALUMNI
Aaron Rabinowitz
Aaron Rabinowitz writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He won PRISM International’s 2023 Creative Non-Fiction Contest, CANSCAIP’s Writing for Children Competition, and is a two-time finalist for Hunger Mountain’s Katherine Paterson Prize. He has earned...
Farnaz Fatemi
Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American writer and editor in Santa Cruz, CA. She is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events, and is Santa Cruz...
Paul Skenazy
Paul Skenazy taught literature and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz for thirty years before retiring to devote full time to his writing. He has published two novels. Temper CA (Miami UP, 2019), won the 2018 Miami University Press Novella Contest....
Kathryn Maxwell
E. M Forster wrote, “only connect,” a quotation that Kathryn Maxwell (b. 1959, Centralia, IL) takes to heart in her artwork exploring the many forms of human connections to each other and the universe. Images from nature and the iconography of science and spirituality...
Perrin Kerns
Perrin Kerns has been teaching literature and writing for over 30 years.She currently teaches at Portland State University, Literary Arts, and the Fishtrap Writers Conference. Her own creative work has taken her from lyric essay to digital storytelling to personal...
Katherine Vondy
Katherine Vondy is a Los Angeles-based writer working in film, theater, and literature. A recipient of The Davey Foundation’s Theatre Grant, her plays have been developed with the Athena Project, Salt Lake Acting Company, Clamour Theatre Company, Fresh Ground Pepper,...
Jacinda Russell
As a conceptual artist with a longstanding interest in edges, borders, and topographical extremes, Jacinda Russell has examined the impacts of human-accelerated climate change in the polar regions since 2017. She works primarily in the mediums of photography,...
Joe Minato
Joe Minato grew up in beautiful Rockwood, Oregon, youngest of six children. He had a childhood of explorations in nature and investigations in science, a gift he wishes for every child. He was born to be a science teacher. He even started a school in his parents’...
Amy Minato
Amy Minato is author of a memoir Siesta Lane, (Skyhorse Press, 2009) and two poetry collections: Hermit Thrush, (Inkwater Press, 2016) and The Wider Lens, (Ice River Press, 2004). Amy has been a recipient of both a Literary Arts Fellowship for her poetry and a Walden...
Deborah Miranda
Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Her hybrid collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. In 2022, the 10th anniversary...
Lofanitani Aisea
Lofanitani is a Black Indigenous actor, writer, filmmaker, influencer, and model based in Los Angeles, CA, and working everywhere. Lofanitani was raised in Oregon both rural on her Klamath reservation in Chiloquin and urban in Portland. From making movies on her flip...
Caroline Tracey
Caroline Tracey is a writer whose work focuses on the US Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico borderlands. As a reporter, Caroline's work appears in the New Yorker, n+1, the Guardian, the Nation, and elsewhere, and in Spanish she is a frequent contributor to Mexico's...
Brittney Corrigan
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado...
Dawn Pichón Barron
Dawn Pichón Barrón is an Indigenous scholar, educator, writer, wife and mother, who lives on the lands of the Medicine Creek (Treaty) tribes and bands. She is the director of the Native Pathways Program at the Evergreen State College, a board member of Artist Trust,...
Allison Hedge Coke
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s authored works include (poetry) The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn, Streaming, Look at This Blue, and a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, and a play, Icicles. She is the editor of ten poetry...
Bridgette Hickey
Bridgette (Bird) Hickey is an emerging self taught multidisciplinary archivist exploring interspecies and multidimensional communication with her ancestors and beyond human beings. She works in repetitive time intensive traditional mediums to weave fragmented and...
Sharita Towne
Sharita Towne is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Portland. Born and raised on the West Coast of the U.S. along Interstate 5 from Salem, OR, to Tacoma, WA, and down to Sacramento, CA. She is most interested in engaging local and global Black...
Ella Ray
Ella Ray is a sister, friend, and an auntie based in Portland, Oregon. Ray uses critical writing and library work to honor and investigate the abundant forms of black femme communication. Ray made their curatorial debut in 2021 with the group show "Nobody's Fool."...
Ahsante Foree
Ahsante Sankofa Foree (Dhey/Dhem : It/its) is an iteration of Black existence making home in occupied lands of Cowlitz, Multnomah, Kathlamet and many other nations of the Nch’i Wána (“The Big River”) aka Portland, Oregon. Its works focus on the inarticulable miracles...
Melanie Stevens
Melanie Stevens is an artist, illustrator and writer. She is the creator of the graphic novel series, WaterShed, and the co-founder and co-curator of Nat Turner Project, a migratory gallery space that grants artists of color the freedom to create or express their own...
Jaleesa Johnson
Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and independent curator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MA from the University of Bergen in Norway....
Ariella V Tai
ariella tai is an experimental filmmaker and independent programmer born and raised in Queens, NY, currently based in Portland, OR. tai is one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of black...
Alan Page
[sic][redacted] | Alan Page (they/he, b. 1987) is a conceptual, new media, and experimental artist who is also a collector and a dabbler. In a big glass jar, they gather media, software, tools, conversations, ideas, and the spaces between what happens when people...
Dawn Stetzel
Dawn Stetzel is an artist from the United States currently living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Her performative sculptures interact with environments in the margins, where humans and nature rub together leaving a sometimes-messy...