My Story . . . a note from Rivera Sun
“Thirty-two years is a short time on a rapidly spinning planet. My story begins at conception, along with my red-headed twin sister, and rapidly erupts into a wildly creative family that boasts five children born within three years of one another. (Two sets of twins.) We were all raised on an organic farm on the northern border of Maine where my penchant for storytelling evolved by inventing stories to break the tedium of weeding. In 2000, I left the farm for college, discovering in my first semester that modern dance existed, and furthermore, you could get a degree in it. Fascinated by the notion that I could tell stories with my body (and convinced that being a dance major would spare me the agony of writing thesis papers), I graduated four years later by choreographing a dance concert. On a trip to California, I realized there were snow-free regions of the country and decided the awe-inspiring Pacific Coast and the magnificent redwood forests of central California would be an excellent place to found my dance-theater company. For seven years, I choreographed and directed stories on stage, eventually writing, performing, and touring a trilogy of one-woman shows, The Freedom Stories of Lala. In 2012, my partner and I moved to the high-altitude desert solitude of Taos, NM, and I began writing social protest novels, publishing a novel on coal and climate change, Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shootings Stars, in late 2012, and a novel about nonviolent struggle to restore democracy, The Dandelion Insurrection, in 2013. This highly eclectic life has also drawn me into aerial dance, local agriculture, Chinese gung-fu tea service, rock climbing, bicycle messengering, radio show hosting, and social activism. Today, I cultivate an acre of vegetables to share with the community, write novels and bake bread, manage social media for activism groups, and organize nonviolent actions for change. I teach writing workshops and have begun to teach a series of small classes on strategic nonviolent struggle.”

For a more traditional bio (in case you need to write about Rivera Sun for something official), please enjoy this:

 Bio

Author/Actress Rivera Sun sings the anthem of our times and rallies us to meet adversity with gusto. She is the author of two social protest novels, The Dandelion Insurrection and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, as well as nine theatrical plays and a book of poetry. Rivera cohosts Occupy Radio with David Geitgey Sierralupe, and cofounded the nationwide nonviolent study and action group network, the Love-in-Action Network. She went to Bennington College to study writing as a Harcourt Scholar and graduated with a degree in dance. After six years working as a professional playwright, choreographer, and director in the San Francisco Bay Area, she founded the nationally touring Rising Sun Dance & Theater company. In 2010, Rivera Sun wrote and currently performs a trilogy of solo theater shows entitled The Freedom Stories of Lala that have received coast-to-coast standing ovations. Rivera lives in an earthship house in Taos, New Mexico, where she grows tomatoes and bakes sourdough bread in an adobe oven. She has red hair, a twin sister, and a fondness for esoteric mystics. Everything else about her – except her writing – is perfectly ordinary.