Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole writer who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu.

She is the author of EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD (Ecco, 2025), Winner of the Asian Pacific American Award in Literature, the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle, a Honolulu Book Award, a Gold Medal in Fiction for the Nautilus Book Awards, shortlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award, and named a best book of 2025 by Esquire, Debutiful, Electric Lit, and Chicago Review of Books. Her hybrid creative nonfiction chapbook, ALL HAT, NO CATTLE was published by Bull City Press in 2023.

Mariah is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, Centrum, and Lambda Literary. Her poetry and prose has been featured in The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently, she teaches creative writing in the valley of the river Kwinitekw at Mount Holyoke College.