Ra Avis

Ra Avis (she/her) is a memoirist, artist, facilitator, and community archivist. As a 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 women 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.