Early New England Gravestone Rubbings, Edmund Gillon
Rebecca Nakaba (they+she) is a queer Japanese American writer and artist. They use the biological and cosmological to show that the boundaries between the body and self, and the natural and supernatural worlds, are thin and flexible. Specimen collections, family history+myths, folktales, sublime landscapes, and scientific research are the source materials for her work.
Their stories and videos are published in khōréō, Chestnut Review, Joyland Magazine, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a semi-finalist for the 2021 North American Review Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize (judged by Kij Johnson); awarded the 2017 SAIC MFAW Writing Fellowship (judged by Paisley Rekdal); and awarded the 2017 Mary Koga Memorial Scholarship (by the Japan America Society of Chicago).
They have exhibited online at The Center for Humans and Nature; and in person at Heaven Gallery (for curated series Moving_Image_00:05), the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (co-curator of exhibit Animals in Space: A Collective Memoir), the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing, Elastic Arts Chicago, The Neofuturists (for Lit Crawl Chicago), and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Japan America Society of Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rebecca is on Twitter @rebeccanakaba