Aida Salazar

Aida Salazar is a multidisciplinary writer, educator, arts administrator, and mother that uses text to explore issues of identity and social justice. She grew up in Southeast Los Angeles where she spent many days sitting in little puddles of water on cement believing she was in the ocean. With an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts, she has performed/read at cultural centers, cafes, alternative art spaces and universities throughout the Southwest and Latin America. She has taught visual art, poetry and fiction to students of all ages. Her writings have appeared in publications such as the Huffington Post and Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory. She was a resident writer at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony, attended Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, is an alumni of the Op-Ed Project’s Write to Change the World Program and a member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She has produced festivals, events, protests, artist residencies, and conferences for a range of groups, non-profits, youth and popular movements. She consulted in the planning and design of cultural spaces including LA's Grand Park and La Plaza de Cultura & Arte. She currently lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, Latin jazz musician, John Santos and home-schools her two fiery artist children for whom many of her children’s stories have been written. She is at work on a novel in verse for middle grades and a book-length memoir, In the Womb of Love, about the death of her first-born infant child. Her story, By the Light of the Moon, was adapted into a ballet production by choreographer, Isabelle Sjahsam and artist, Roberto Miguel, for the Sonoma Conservatory of Dance. This Chicana-themed ballet that premiered in April 2016, is one of the few of its kind in ballet history.