[Her work has] energies of fierce need, searching and self-possession...peers deeply and thoughtfully into pain...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.
—Joanna Klink, author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
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[Stephanie Adams-Santos] 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, author of Yearling
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Stephanie Adams-Santos is a Guatemalan-American writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and other swampy, hybrid forms. Her work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, and environment — with a penchant for the queer and uncanny. Stephanie's full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen's Crown (Fathom Books) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrates excellence in LGBTQ voices. She is also the author of Total Memory (Finishing Line Press), and The Sundering (Poetry Society of America), selected for a New York Chapbook Fellowship. Stephanie tends to an occasional personal press called Ojo de la Selva. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Film Independent, Regional Arts and Culture Council and Oregon Arts Commission. Stephanie was a 2019 Project Involve Screenwriting Fellow and recipient of a 2019 Chaz Ebert Fellowship. She was recently a Staff Writer on the second season of Two Sentence Horror Stories, coming soon to the CW. Her produced short script "La Gloria", a queer intergenerational story about family and unrequited love, is currently screening at festivals internationally.
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...a distinct and bold new voice
— Film Independent / PR Newswire
What or where is "Obscuro Beach"?
Obscuro Beach is a recurring place of my dreams & imagination. Obscure (enigmatic, vague, not easily grasped) + oscuro ("dark" in spanish) = Obscuro. It's a place of Strange sightings & Poetical phenomena. A place from my childhood fantasies & memory, where the two mingle & merge. A bizarro kind of place. It is born of the childhood beaches where I played out with my siblings elaborate and thrilling games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment—the unfolding shores of Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay, Monterico, Guatemala. It's the tide of washed up things. Where la llorona floats along at the edges of the mist at the hour just before sleep. Where sorrow festers amorphously (and amorously), crowned by flies and gulls. It's a place where mystery and magic are allowed to dwell and deepen and Be. It is always & never, not-quite-here and yet—it's here, it's right where we are. It's the strange place within where we are all our selves at once or none at all.
—SAS
Obscuro Beach is a recurring place of my dreams & imagination. Obscure (enigmatic, vague, not easily grasped) + oscuro ("dark" in spanish) = Obscuro. It's a place of Strange sightings & Poetical phenomena. A place from my childhood fantasies & memory, where the two mingle & merge. A bizarro kind of place. It is born of the childhood beaches where I played out with my siblings elaborate and thrilling games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment—the unfolding shores of Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay, Monterico, Guatemala. It's the tide of washed up things. Where la llorona floats along at the edges of the mist at the hour just before sleep. Where sorrow festers amorphously (and amorously), crowned by flies and gulls. It's a place where mystery and magic are allowed to dwell and deepen and Be. It is always & never, not-quite-here and yet—it's here, it's right where we are. It's the strange place within where we are all our selves at once or none at all.
—SAS