photo credit: Jessi Wahnetah
Kaia Sand is a poet, artist, and community organizer. She is author of three books of poetry—interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year; Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010); and A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016); and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008).
Sand works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts. From 2013-2015, she served with Garrick Imatani as artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, responding to historical surveillance files on local political activists; and then she created textile art with street vendor Marcia Rodrigues Braga during her Despina International Artist Residency in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Much of her work has focused on economic injustice and homelessness, from a magic show she created about the financial collapse to the Right 2 Survive Ambassador Program she co-founded for housed people to learn from people experiencing homelessness.
She is the executive director of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and poverty as means of earning an income.