RA AVIS

ARTIST, ARCHIVIST, HELPER

Building achingly human neighborhoods by braiding revolutions.

Projects >>>

Ra Avis / 2201 N. Lakewood Blvd #D1887 / Long Beach, CA 90815

Ra Avis (she/her) is a memoirist, artist, facilitator, and community archivist. As a widowed, formerly incarcerated, autistic, Desi-Chicana writer, her work navigates the intersections of grief, disability, incarceration, and collective care. She is the award-winning blogger behind Rarasaur.com, a site that has reached more than 15,000 regular readers for over a decade, and the author of Dinosaur-Hearted and Flowers & Stars.In 2025, she was awarded the Writing Freedom Fellowship by Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation, and was included as one of the impacted people in Fiona Apple’s "Let Her Go" music video.Avis’s storytelling blends personal vulnerability with systemic critique, centering the achingly human stretch toward something more than survival. Beyond her published work, she is an active speaker across Long Beach, California, and leads multiple projects that bridge digital and analog communities. She is the founder of Kites Library, an incarceration-centered zine archive preserving system-impacted resource sharing, and a co-founding organizer of the Biggest Little Zine Fair, a reimagining of traditional distro culture and a celebration of community-led publishing.Her visual artwork has been featured at the Museum of Latin American Art, The Other Art Fair, and is often donated to charitable abolitionist events across Southern California.

SELECT VIDEOS

Human-Centered Support

Ra offers contracted services to support organizational infrastructure development through a lived, abolitionist, and trauma-informed lens. With a background in communications and justice-centered design, she works with nonprofits, grassroots orgs, startups, academic institutions, and coalitions.Services include: Strategic consulting & facilitation; Workflow and internal systems design; Communication infrastructure; Visual and narrative design supportIdeal for those building values-aligned, sustainable structures.
References available upon request.

Talks & Workshops

Workshops, Speaking & Creative OfferingsRa is available for panels, presentations, podcast appearances, and poetry readings on topics within her scope. She also facilitates hands-on workshops and reflective sessions designed to engage and transform.➜ Liberation via Imperfection: On how embracing the imperfect and unknown can transform.
➜ Activism After Impact: Reflections on the pressures to lead or perform activism after encountering harm.
➜ Creating What You Can Hold: A hands-on zine workshop exploring zines, letters, stamps, and ritual objects.
➜ The Work of Grief: On channeling grief in and out of creative practice and liberation work.
➜ The Questions We Carry: Learning to ask deeper, more meaningful questions through reflective practice.
➜ You Can Break It Later: A practical session delivering "what works right now" tools for neurodivergent folk.Ra is a practiced panelist and podcast speaker on topics including: the impact of solitary confinement; racial justice and carceral systems; creativity amid the challenges of survival; navigating reentry; amplifying the experience of women's prisons in justice movements; menstrual justice inside and outside of prison; challenging copaganda; the risks of surveillance technology in incarceration; developing media literacy; and the power of narrative in justice work.

LET'S WORK TOGETHER

Ra welcomes inquiries from students, collaborators, and readers alike—whether you're exploring a creative idea, organizing an event, or just want to connect. She's available for panels, workshops, podcasts, and other engagements. Use the form below to get in touch.