Christina Rivera is a Pushcart Prize-winning essayist, author, and environmental writer from Colorado whose girlhood was bordered by coastlines of Pacific Ocean. She funded the global pilgrimage that is the canvas of My Oceans working for seventeen years in the field of international experiential education (for Where There Be Dragons). Christina worked primarily as the Director of the Princeton University Bridge Year Program, and also as the Communications and Digital Marketing Director. Amidst the 2020 crash of the travel industry, Christina finished her debut book, My Oceans, a sea-linked collection of essays that weaves immersive storytelling with embodied climate science and explores the oceanic kinship of bodies of water and beings. My Oceans was longlisted for the Graywolf Prize, a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature in 2022.
Christina’s individual essays are published at Kenyon Review, Orion Magazine, The Cut, Catapult, Bat City Review, HuffPost Personal, Atticus Review, The Fourth River, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things. She won Pacifica Literary Review’s 2019 CNF Contest judged by Melissa Febos and her essay, The 17th Day, published at Terrain.org won the John Burroughs 2023 Nature Essay Award (the highest annual honor for a creative nonfiction essay on place, science, and the environment). Christina is also the grateful recipient of artist residencies at Craigardan and Wellstone in the Redwoods.
When she is not drafting literary work, Christina works in the field of climate communications as an environmental copywriter.