Samantha Arriozola

Instructor

Samantha Arriozola (she/her/hers) is a Chicana writer and youth worker from the Chicagoland-area. She has spent the past eight years working in nonprofit spaces and community centers in Madison, WI and New York City. She has been with Writopia Lab since 2020, and even went to camp for the first time since she was ten for WriCampia 2021. Sam received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing as a proud member of the 8th Cohort of First Wave—a Hip-Hop and urban arts full-tuition scholarship program at UW-Madison, centering the pursuit of higher education with arts, academics, and activism. Sam is a poet with roots in the world of spoken word poetry and slam, a background that has carried over in coaching young spoken word artists to compete in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in 2017 and 2018. Sam's poetry has been published in Pinwheel Journal (2018) and Cutthroat Journal: Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology (2020). Sam lives in Queens with her human and plant roommates, editing both her own and fellow writers' work with chamomile tea by her side.