About Foglifter

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of the forthcoming collection Look Alive—a finalist for numerous prizes, including The National Poetry Series, and winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press—along with six chapbooks, most recently Tender Age, winner of the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew chapbook contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Third Coast, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.​ Learn more at luizaflynngoodlett.com

Reach Luiza at info@foglifterpress.com

Wesley O. Cohen (she/her) is a writer and editor living in Davis, California. Her work has been featured by Joyland Magazine, Entropy, Sparkle & Blink, and others. She is a 2017 Writing By Writers fellow. Wesley’s work lives at wesleyocohen.com.

Dan Lau (he/him) is a Chinese American poet from Queens, New York. A Kundiman fellow, he is the recipient of scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Queer Cultural Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in Generations, Cape Cod Review, Gesture, RHINO, CRATE, Colorado Review, and others.

Reach Dan at poetry@foglifterpress.com

Chad Koch (he/him) received his MFA from San Francisco State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Fourteen Hills. He’s the recipient of the 2010 Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship and the Leo Litwak fiction award from Transfer Magazine. He was assistant editor on Lawfully Wedded Wives: Rethinking Marriage in 21st Century. He is a 2016 fellow at The Grotto in San Francisco. His most recent stories were published in The North American Review, The Madison Review, Eleven Eleven, The East Bay Review (for which he received a Pushcart nomination) and Into the Void.

Reach Chad at books@foglifterpress.com

Jessie Galloway (she/her)  is a queer San Francisco-based poet with an MFA from Pacific University. A 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow, she’s the author of the chapbook Liminal: A Life of Cleavage published by Lost Horse Press. She directs and teaches poetry for Litquake’s Elder Writing Project, and serves as a poetry editor and the Development Director for Foglifter Press. She works full-time for the Disability Communications Fund as a Grants Program Associate where she writes poetry on smoke breaks. In her spare time, she enjoys riveting conversations with her best editor, a wily orange cat, named Snacks.

Reach Jessie at development@foglifterpress.com

Miah Jeffra (they/them/he/him) is author of the collections The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press 2017) and The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (forthcoming Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Atticus Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah teaches Writing and Cultural Studies at Santa Clara University and San Francisco Art Institute.

Reach Miah at fabulous@foglifterpress.com for journal and book production.

Monique Mero (she/her) is an east bay native. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a MA in Creative writing, was the Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco Review and is currently a member of the Red Light Lit team. Monique is also a full-time English Instructor at Chabot College where she has the honor of working with the Daraja Program, which focuses on the African Diaspora. It is important to Monique to give back to the culturally rich community she comes from by helping the people in her community have a voice and accomplish their goals.

Tara Rose (they/them) is a genderqueer, San Francisco-based poet who often writes about love. Their works have been included in Quiet Lightning, Plunge Magazine, Red Light Lit, and Writing Without Walls.

Irwan (he/him) sporadically writes about being a gay agnostic muslim immigrant from Malaysia, dealing with issues of identity, memory and mothers who haunt their errant children regardless of where they go.

Charlie (they/them) is a tall artist that writes short poems to compensate. They are published in Transfer magazine and are working to get to the point where lines from their work are tattooed out of context. They currently work as an assistant poetry editor for Foglifter Journal and a deputy editor for MARY.

Melton Cartes (he/him) is an advertising agency art director/graphic designer and animator. His heroes are Saul Bass, Stanley Kubrick, and Bill Bernbach, to name a few. He’s also an aspiring screenwriting with 25 scripts under his belt, 13 of which he considers completed and market-worthy, 3 of which reached the semifinals in the Nicholl Fellowships and the Austin Film Festival. He loves languages.

Celeste Chan (she/her) is a hybrid writer, filmmaker, and arts organizer. She is a queer student of experimentation, schooled by DIY and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. She’s received residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, Soaring Gardens, SF Writer’s Grotto, and VONA. Her writing can be found in Ada, As/us, AWAY, cream city review, Feminist Wire, Glitterwolf, Hyphen, Matador, and in anthologies: Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Galaxy (Publication Studio), and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Transgenre Press). Her short films have screened locally and internationally. Alongside KB Boyce, she co-directs Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project.

Born and raised in San Francisco, CA, Thea Matthews (she/her) is a published poet, scholar, and activist who writes on the complexities of humanity, grief, and resiliency. Find her at www.theamatthews.com 

Arisa White (she/her) is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, Black Pearl, Perfect on Accident, and “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. Published by Virtual Artists Collective, her debut full-length collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was a finalist for the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards, 82nd California Book Awards, and nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Awards. Her second collection, A Penny Saved, inspired by the true-life story of Polly Mitchell, was published by Willow Books, an imprint of Aquarius Press in 2012. Her newest full-length collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, was published by Augury Books and nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Awards. Most recently, Arisa co-authored, with Laura Atkins, Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a middle-grade biography in verse on the midwife and philanthropist Bridget “Biddy” Mason, which is the second book in the Fighting for Justice series. In the fall of 2018, Arisa joined the English Department at Colby College as an assistant professor in creative writing.

Baruch Porras-Hernandez (he/him) is the author of the chapbooks I Miss You, Delicate and Lovers of the Deep Fried Circle both with Sibling Rivalry Press. He had the honor of touring with the legendary Sister Spit Queer poetry tour in 2019, is a is a two-time winner of Literary Death Match, a regular host of literary shows for KQED, and was named a Writer to Watch in 2016 by 7×7 Magazine. His poetry can be found with Write Bloody Publishing, The Tusk, Foglifter, Assaracus, and many more. He has been an artist in residence at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and Playwriting. He’s been featured in shows with The Rumpus, Writers with Drinks, has performed several times with Radar Productions, LitQuake, and Quiet Lightning. He is the head organizer of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? a Latinx literary performance series, he is an immigrant, originally from Mexico, and is currently the lead artist in a multidisciplinary project that will create new Queer Latino Superheroes with MACLA, which stands for Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose. He lives in San Francisco.

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (he/him) was born in Los Angeles and attended Ramona Convent College Preparatory School for Girls in a former incarnation of his life. He is a Cave Canem fellow and was the recipient of an individual artist’s grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2011. Author of the chapbook Camouflage published by MaCaHu Press, his poems, plays, and visual art have been published in Black Arts Quarterly, Lodestar Quarterly, Enizagam, and New American Writing 25, among others.

D. A. Powell’s (he/him) books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Powell has taught at Harvard, Columbia University, Davidson College, University of Iowa, Stanford and, most recently, at University of San Francisco.

(they/them) Birmingham, England; Sri Lankan; queer; brown; big, curly hair; can talk about decolonization any day of the week; afraid of cats; BA in art history (…in progress); San Francisco / Chicago

Serena Chopra (she/her) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, soundscape designer and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and was a Kundiman Fellow, a 2011-2013 Redline artist in Residence, a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India), and has received a month-long artist residency at Understudy Denver for September 2020. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana/Chapti (2018, winner of ArtHyve’s Archives as Muse Film grant, Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, Seattle Queer Film Festival, Nahia Film Festival and Cinema Diverse) and Mother Ghosting (2018). Serena was recently a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com

Kanika Agrawal (she/her) is an Indian citizen and hybrid specimen raised in six countries on four continents. Currently, she lives with her toy fox terrier in Denver, CO. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, FOLDER, Notre Dame Review, SAND, and various SF&F publications. Selections from her manuscript Okazaki Fragments, which draws on a series of scientific papers on discontinuous DNA replication, were published in 2019 in Foglifter 4.1. More fragments will materialize in 2020 in a chapbook from Oversound. You can find out more at her website.