Bio
A lover of hats, Kaia Sand wears many — public safety reformer, poet, nonfiction writer, artist and organizer, and she has worked as a university professor and non-profit executive, as well as in artistic residencies. She’s currently writing a book, Unwanted Persons, that tells the story of an emerging new first responder branch based on care, no less than a quiet revolution in public safety, and more recent writing can be found at the Nation and Orion Magazine. She wrote over 300 weekly newspaper columns at Street Roots and continues to write columns at unwantedpersons.substack.com. She also co-chairs the Portland Street Response advisory committee.
Kaia Sand is a poet, nonfiction writer, artist and organizer, and she has worked as a university professor and non-profit executive, as well as in artistic residencies.
transforming public safety
Since 2019, Kaia has pursued the creation of a new branch of public safety, one based on care that’s dispatched by 911. It’s a clearcut solution in a world that can be short on those. She first worked on creating Portland Street Response while served as executive director of Street Roots, writing over 30 columns on this topic, as well as starting a city-wide campaign and research that drew from the leadership of people who were homeless. She’s now writing a book, Unwanted Persons, that tells these stories as well as many others through her journey across the United States to shadow programs that have started since 2020 — Albuquerque, New Mexico; Durham, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Dayton, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Fairbanks, Alaska; and Rochester, New York. All told, there are more than 130 programs. She files dispatches on her journey at unwantedpersons.substack.com; and has written for the Nation Magazine. She’s currently co-chair of the Portland Street Response advisory committee for the city of Portland. (more)
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books & performances
Kaia Sand is the author of four books—A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016); Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010); interval (Edge Books 2004), named Small Press Traffic Book of the Year; and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent (Palm Press 2008). Her text comprises two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dream series (Steidl Editions 2008).
Sand works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts, including the Remember to Wave poetry walks and the Happy Valley Project, an investigation of housing foreclosures and financial speculation that included the magic show that serves as the title piece of her most recent book. She received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council for these projects.
nonprofit leadership
From 2017-2024, Sand served as executive director of the Portland street newspaper, Street Roots. She assumed leadership two decades after she worked as a staff reporter for the Burnside Cadillac, the predecessor to Street Roots — and she served in this capacity for seven years. Some highlights of this time include her leadership starting Portland Street Response; her commitment to equity as an organization strength that led them through the pandemic — uplifting the strengths, passions and aptitudes of people experiencing homelessness — and served as vision for civic engagement, including creating the conditions for people on the streets to survey other people on the streets to inform public policy; her strategic vision to design a building based on universal design principles and a holistic approach to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs realized through architectures (which she realized through leading a $6 million fundraising campaign); and her commitment to public memory through archives, a project that is ongoing as the University of Oregon digitizes twenty-five years of Street Roots and the Burnside Cadillac.
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Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, Sand grew up in Salem, Oregon. Her parents were journalists and exposure to their vocations—the interviews, the investigations, the urgency of language crawling over a newswire—marks her poetry. Sand earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Portland. While living in Portland in the 90s, she began a zine called the Tangent with Jules Boykoff, Neal Sand, and Max Boykoff; the zine evolved into a radio show, reading series, and small press.
She moved to Washington DC in 1998, where she earned an MFA in poetry at George Mason University (2001), worked as Carolyn Forché’s assistant, and became active in Washington DC poetry communities, curating the In Your Ear series in Adams Morgan with Tom Orange and Jules Boykoff.
teaching
After earning her MFA, she then moved to Southern Maryland to teach at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She helped Michael Glaser direct the St. Mary’s Poetry Festival in 2004, and team-taught poetry workshops with him in England in 2005, 2007, and 2009. In 2005, Sand and Jules Boykoff returned to the west coast, first to Walla Walla, Washington, and then, Portland, Oregon. Sand taught at Willamette University from 2005-2007, and at Pacific University from 2006-2013. She taught at the Portland State University Honors Program as the Resident Poet from 2014-2016. During these years, she designed many course, including “Poetry and Politics,” “Poetry & the Avant Guard,” “The Open Notebook,” “Ecopoetry,” “Public Humanities” and “Activism and the Archives.” With her mother, Meg Eberle, she co-founded Vignettes & Verses, a writing and personal history institute; they led writing workshops in County Cork, Ireland in 2014, 2016 and 2017; and Meg continues to lead writing workshops from Portland, Oregon. She continues to teach workshops.
residencies & installations
In a collaboration with artist Garrick Imatani, she was artist-in-residence from 2013-2015 at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center. In 2015, she served in the Despina Artist Residency at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, returning to present a solo exhibition of this work at the Cascade Gallery, Portland Community College. This spring she is exhibiting her work in the Expanded Readings exhibit at the Sheppard Contemporary, University Nevada, Reno, curated by Inge Bruggeman
Sand lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland with Jules Boykoff and is the proud mother of an adult daughter, Jessi Wahnetah. She is a member of PEN American Center. She also designs clothing, embroiders and knits, as well as writes about textiles and politics.
Contact Kaia Sand at sand(at)kaiasand(dot)net
