What is Obscuro Beach?

Obscuro Beach is a place of Strange sightings & Poetical phenomena. A place of recurring dreams & childhood fantasies. An obscure place. A bizarro kind of place. It is born of the childhood beaches where I played out elaborate and thrilling games of mystery and murder with my siblings: Manzanita, Cannon, Neah Bay. It's the tide of washed up things. Where la llorona floats along the edge of the mist at the hour of sleep. Where sorrow festers amorphously, crowned by flies and gulls. It's a place where mystery and magic are allowed to dwell and deepen. It is always & never, not-quite-here and yet—it's here, can't you feel it?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    —S. A-S.

Stephanie’s work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, identity, and environment. Her work “invokes history as a knowledge that can be felt, something with the potential to transform (and transform our perspectives) at the intersections of language and image, intimacy and violence, and grief and galvanization” (Lo Kwa Mei-En). When guest editor Joanna Klink featured Stephanie’s poems on West Branch Wired, she described the work in her introduction as having “energies of fierce need, searching and self-possession”, work that “peers deeply and thoughtfully into pain.” She says: “Adams is heir to Roethke…There is a distinct, composed wildness in her voice. She is preoccupied with solitude and its effects on the body, and you can find her, in poems, scouring a landscape for what lives there, then reaching into it.”

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STEPHANIE ADAMS-SANTOS is a queer Guatemalan-American poet, writer and mystic from Portland, Oregon. Her new full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, the world’s most prestigious literary award which celebrates excellence in LGBTQ publishing and voices. She is also the author of several chapbooks: Total Memory (Finishing Line Press) and Little Fugues (Sola Books); her award-winning chapbook The Sundering was selected by Linda Gregg for an Academy of American Poets New York Chapbook Fellowship.  Stephanie has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she was a finalist for the Corporeal Voices “THE VOICE IS A MUSCLE” Fellowship for writers of color. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including Guernica, The Boston Review,  Orion Magazine, Nailed, Noble Gas Quarterly, and others. A ritualized production of Stephanie’s work was featured at Poetry Press Week in Portland, OR, and she is the recipient of a 2016 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. Stephanie earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a BA in English at Stanford University. She is the founder of Tarot Obscuro and Ojo de la Selva Press. She teaches poetry at the Independent  Publishing Resource Center, Literary Arts, and Portland Community College.