Christina Rivera

Christina Rivera is a Pushcart Prize-winning essayist and ecofeminist writer whose debut book, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press), received the IPNE Gold Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Best Debut designation from the Chicago Review of Books, recognition as one of LitHub's Notable Small Press Books of 2025, and a longlisting for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her essay "The 17th Day" won the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, the highest annual honor for a creative nonfiction essay on place, science, and the environment. Her first novel is with her agent. To avoid the terror of that phase, she is juggling three first drafts of new projects.

Her essays have appeared in Orion, The Kenyon Review, The Cut, Terrain.org, River Teeth, Bat City Review, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Before her writing life, she spent seventeen years in international experiential education, including as Director of the Princeton University Bridge Year Program, designing and leading programs across six continents. Christina credits the fragmentation of her writing to her two young children and is also the grateful recipient of creative residencies at Millay Arts, Craigardan, and the Wellstone Center.

Christina lives in the Rocky Mountains, but often runs away to inhale the silence of the Utah desert. More at christinarivera.com.