About Us
Our Amazing Team
Welcome to We Are Urban Haiku!
We are so glad you are here.
In establishing this emergent space, we envisioned a rich and magical expanse that encourages exploration, innovation, and the unapologetic embrace of one's unique narrative.
We’re here to co-conspire, swim around in each other’s processes, learn from each other, geek out about aspects of craft, and hold space with/for each other as we keep decolonizing, keep practicing self-love and grace, and keep agitating towards revolution.
Scroll down to meet our amazing, kick ass team!
Anya Pearson
Anya Pearson (she/her/we) is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She was a 2021-2022 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. She was also the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation run by best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch, for her choreopoem, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Made to Dance in Burning Buildings was showcased at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and received its World Premiere at Shaking the Tree Theatre. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration of black bodies and the other numerous failings of our criminal justice system. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List, won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script, and was a Finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Drama. Anya was a finalist for the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard, the 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University and the National Black Theatre’s 2019 I Am Soul Playwriting Residency. She is currently under commission at Portland Center Stage and Many Hats. Her poetry appears in Electric Literature. A spoonie. A survivor. A single mother. A body alive with multiple nexuses of marginalized identity and sediments of trauma, Anya is a fierce advocate for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, BIPOC folx, the chronically ill, those with rare diseases, and the disabled. Her best production is her 11-year-old daughter, Aidy, who can be seen, most nights, trying to circumvent bedtime by asking deep philosophical questions like: “When are we going to see the world? When is my life going to truly begin?”
Gimi Willie
Gimi Willie (she/her/hers) is an Indigenous author, poet, and artist in Southern California, with deep roots in her native Pacific Northwest. She has been married for 30 years, has raised two successful, adult daughters, and still isn’t sure what she wants to be when she grows up, besides a writer. She is addicted to attending classes in her quest to learn and grow as a human. She loves hanging out with her family, working out, attending rock concerts, and traveling. She has lots of cats, not enough tattoos, and lives to create beautiful things. Gimi was the First Place Personal Essay winner for the SDCCD League for Innovation 2022 Student Literary Award Competition, and won the award for 2nd place in the International Award Competition. Gimi was chosen to perform for the So Say We All VAMP Storytelling Showcase at both San Diego City and Mesa Colleges. She has had multiple works published, including most recently a poem in the CityWorks Journal 2024 Anthology and an essay in the Months to Years Literary Journal Summer 2024 issue.
Kenda Willie
Kenda Willie (they/them/theirs). Raised in a multi-Indigenous household, Kenda and their family hail from the Navajo Nation and the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. As a first-generation college student, they earned degrees and state certifications in Criminal Justice and Forensic Technology with a specialization in multicultural community relations. They also served as the first openly queer and indigenous president for the American Criminal Justice Association. They now work on advocating for the representation of Indigenous peoples and decolonization efforts in the Society for Creative Anachronism, where they are the only openly indigenous community baronial deputy. Kenda enjoys breaking stereotypes, fighting the metaphorical man, and general tomfoolery tackling race, gender, sexuality, etc. In their free time, they love to play Dungeons & Dragons, go to heavy metal concerts, and read from their growing library. They have been writing and performing poetry since 2014.
Ella deCastro Baron
Ella deCastro Baron (she:siya:we) is a second generation Filipina American born and raised in Coastal Miwok territory (Vallejo, California). She is a VONA alum, holds an MFA, teaches Composition and Creative Writing at San Diego City College and U Mass, and co-facilitates "Where We Come From: Writing Your Ethnoautobiography" and "To Exist is to Flare: Loving Our Chronically Ill Minds and Bodies" through Corporeal Writing. Ella's first book of creative nonfiction is, Itchy, Brown Girl Seeks Employment, and she's published in Nonwhite and Woman, (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Epidemic, Anomaly, and The Rumpus. Her next book, Subos and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, will be published in 2023. As a woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, images, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling. She produces workshops and kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. She lives and loves on Kumeyaay territory (San Diego, CA) with her husband and interracial family. Her favorite pronoun is We.
G. Ravyn Stanfield
G. Ravyn Stanfield (she/her/they) is a writer, trainer, acupuncturist, and relational therapist constantly mushrooming her lust for our planet. Ravyn has been learning, stumbling, and course-correcting in justice and repair art/action/amplification since 1996. She loves all trees and dogs, some cats, a few selected nuts, and a surprising amount of humans.
Alexis Macnab
Alexis Macnab (ey/em/eir pronouns) channels creativity across disciplines, and is endlessly inspired by the way each medium collaborates with the story it tells. Alexis's work in theater has been produced internationally and across the U.S., eir hand-drawn and stop-motion animation has been commissioned for films and music videos, ey has curated pop-up art gallery happenings, and brought works of Shakespeare into peoples’ kitchens and living rooms. Alexis spent the pandemic years transforming in many ways, including from a City-and-Karaoke-Loving Theater Person, into a Slime-Mold-Curious Writer-Artist Apprentice Tree. In fiction, Alexis is interested in twisting the tools of fable and folktale to challenge inherited assumptions, dig for buried truths, and cast spells of compassion. Alexis holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Eir writing can be found online in The Ilanot Review, Atticus Review, and https://alexismacnab.com.