Riley Yaxley is most frequently a dinner party host, a fishkeeper, a homebody, a beach rat, a wallflower, a transgressor, a professional email sender, a progeny of “Midwestern Nice,” a dance hobbyist, a flâneuse (if such a thing is possible), a glutton, an errant daughter who forgets to call her mom, a shameless navel gazer; and sometimes, she is also an essayist, memoirist, and art writer.

The middle child of seven, Riley was born and raised in a Detroit suburb and currently lives in Chicago on the stolen land of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples. She earned her BA and MA in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse from DePaul University. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Sixty Inches from Center, Chicago Gallery News, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s journal of arts administration & policy. She is currently an editor for Sixty Inches from Center.