[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, and screenwriting — always with a penchant for the queer and fantastical. She is the author of Dream of Xibalba (forthcoming, winner of the Orison Prize in Poetry), Swarm Queen's Crown (finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards), Total Memory, and The Sundering (selected for a New York Chapbook Fellowship by Poetry Society of America). Stephanie has been a story editor on the CW anthology horror series Two Sentence Horror Stories (now on Netflix) and is currently a writer on an upcoming 20th Century/Disney+ live action fantasy series and is developing an original fantasy pilot as part of the 2022 Ojala Ignition Fellowship. Stephanie’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Film Independent, Regional Arts and Culture Council and Oregon Arts Commission. In addition to her literary work, Stephanie is a Tarot reader and instructor of poetry and divination. She is making headway on a Major Arcana tarot deck inspired by occult animism.
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[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"
...a distinct and bold new voice
— Film Independent / PR Newswire
A note about "Obscuro Beach"
In high school, I found a tiny vintage book at Goodwill called "The Philosopher's Stone." It was full of arcane concepts and diagrams that fascinated and beguiled me. I had stumbled upon a work on Alchemy. Without understanding what I was reading, I could grasp the sense of a veiled, spiritual language of change and transformation. A certain phrase from the book, "Obscurum per obscurius," has stuck with me to this day. To me, it means that Mystery is a crucial mechanism by which to approach understanding. It is a veil that is never fully lifted — an eternally rippling fabric that beckons us toward what is hidden, while always evading full comprehension. The idea of Mystery is a theme in all my creative expressions.
"Obscuro Beach" was the title of one of my earliest poems. The poem was inspired by the Pacific Northwest beaches of my childhood (Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay) where my siblings and I played out elaborate games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment. The beach to me never represented "vacation" in the sense of palm trees and beach umbrellas. It was a primal place of churning waters, constant fog and rain, washed up bodies of birds and sea-things. There, la Llorona floated along the edges of the mist at the hour just before sleep, where sorrow festered amorphously (and amorously) in the tide-foam, crowned by flies and gulls. A primal place. A mysterious place.
"Obscuro Beach", then, refers to a recurring place of dreaming and recollection that can't be fully grasped. Obscure (enigmatic, vague, not easily grasped) + oscuro ("dark" in spanish) = Obscuro. And the callback to the Latin: Obscurum per obscurius. A place from my childhood fantasies and memory, where the two mingle and merge, a palimpsest of the imagination over time. A bizarro kind of place. A place of Mystery. A place that doesn't exist, yet does.
In high school, I found a tiny vintage book at Goodwill called "The Philosopher's Stone." It was full of arcane concepts and diagrams that fascinated and beguiled me. I had stumbled upon a work on Alchemy. Without understanding what I was reading, I could grasp the sense of a veiled, spiritual language of change and transformation. A certain phrase from the book, "Obscurum per obscurius," has stuck with me to this day. To me, it means that Mystery is a crucial mechanism by which to approach understanding. It is a veil that is never fully lifted — an eternally rippling fabric that beckons us toward what is hidden, while always evading full comprehension. The idea of Mystery is a theme in all my creative expressions.
"Obscuro Beach" was the title of one of my earliest poems. The poem was inspired by the Pacific Northwest beaches of my childhood (Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay) where my siblings and I played out elaborate games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment. The beach to me never represented "vacation" in the sense of palm trees and beach umbrellas. It was a primal place of churning waters, constant fog and rain, washed up bodies of birds and sea-things. There, la Llorona floated along the edges of the mist at the hour just before sleep, where sorrow festered amorphously (and amorously) in the tide-foam, crowned by flies and gulls. A primal place. A mysterious place.
"Obscuro Beach", then, refers to a recurring place of dreaming and recollection that can't be fully grasped. Obscure (enigmatic, vague, not easily grasped) + oscuro ("dark" in spanish) = Obscuro. And the callback to the Latin: Obscurum per obscurius. A place from my childhood fantasies and memory, where the two mingle and merge, a palimpsest of the imagination over time. A bizarro kind of place. A place of Mystery. A place that doesn't exist, yet does.