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

Her short story collection EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD(Ecco/HarperCollins, 2025), is the Winner of the Asian Pacific American Award in Literature, Winner of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle, Winner of a Gold Medal in Fiction from the Nautilus Book Awards, and was named a best book of 2025 by Esquire, Electric Lit, Debutiful, 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, 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 Kwinitekw Valley at Mount Holyoke College.