Riley Yaxley is most often a dinner party host, a fishkeeper, a beach rat, a flâneuse, a glutton, a flirt, a dancer, a delinquent daughter who forgets to call her mom; and she is also a writer, editor, and arts administrator.

The middle child of seven, Riley was born and raised in a Detroit suburb and currently lives in Chicago on the stolen land of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples. She earned her BA and MA in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse from DePaul University; participated in the 2025 Tin House Winter Workshop, 2023 Muña Art Writing Residency, and Live Arts Writer Network’s Non-Conforming Criticisms Lab; and has been a resident artist at ACRE and Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Sixty Inches from Center, Dopamine Books’ CLOWNS, A Great Gay Book, and Catapult. She is currently an editor for Sixty Inches from Center.