Allya Yourish is a writer, photographer, and educator from Portland, Oregon. She studied art history at New College of Florida, writing her thesis entitled "Housing an Unspeakable Memory: Abstracted Manifestations of the Void of Jewish Life within the Jewish Museum of Berlin" on the architectures of genocide memory. She worked as an au pair in Paris, France, living in Shakespeare and Company, an English language bookshop, as a "Tumbleweed" while writing tremendously depressing poetry. She briefly worked as a News Assistant at the New York Times before beginning a Fulbright grant in Kuala Krau, Malaysia, where she taught English through pedagogy focused on creative problem solving, learned how to use her camera, and lost many, many games of badminton. At the conclusion of the grant, she moved back to New York, where she worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and started an ecopoetry magazine with her friends. Naturally, after a few years, she moved to Ames, Iowa for her MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment at Iowa State University. Now, she works as a grant writer in Portland, and her poems are much less depressing. 

 

She writes: poems about queerness, the body, the earth, and art. Her poems are available online, in print, and (on sunny days) in Laurealhurst Park, typewritten on demand. When brave, she also writes nonfiction. Her writing has been supported by the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship.

 

She photographs: portraits, couples/engagement shoots, and families. She uses a film camera lens on a modern digital camera body, so her work evokes hazy nostalgia in high resolution. She loves capturing authentic moments of joy, and has been honored to donate her time to photographing elopements at the Big Queer Wedding and at Loving Day 2025 at the Multnomah County Courthouse. She offers pay-what-you-can pricing to queer folks in need of photography.

 

She teaches: embodied poetry workshops, with options available for generative work or radical revision.