About Foglifter

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett  (she/her) is the author of 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 seven chapbooks, most recently The Undead, winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in TriQuarterly, Third Coast, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Learn more at luizaflynngoodlett.com

Reach Luiza at info@foglifterpress.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.

Miah Jeffra (they/them/he/him) is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, The Violence Almanac, The First Church of What’s Happening, the forthcoming novel American Gospel, and co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Most recent work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, DIAGRAM, jubilat and Barrelhouse. Miah teaches writing and antiracist studies at Santa Clara University.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

N/A Oparah (she/her) is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer. Her other work has appeared in Madwomen in the Attic, QXotc, Fictional International, ANMLY and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain and Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a B.S. in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA. She is studying towards a PhD at Loughborough University in Creative Arts and Design in the UK. Her novella, Thick Skin, is forthcoming with KERNPUNKT Press (April 2021). More on her here.

Milo Todd’s (he/him) fiction focuses on trans and queer history, with additional works on the trans experience and the trans body. His fiction has appeared in SLICE Magazine, Foglifter Journal, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press), and Emerge: The 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology (Lambda Literary Press). He was kindly selected as a 2021 Tin House attendee, a 2021 Monson Arts resident, and a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee. He was also named a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction for his novel DOWNHEAD (formerly SNUFF) and received a fellowship to attend the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. He is an alum of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program, where he received a Pechet Fellowship for his novel THE FALCON OF DOVES. Milo currently teaches writing at GrubStreet and he consults on fiction manuscripts and transgender inclusion in the classroom. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @Todd_Milo. In fiction, he especially loves historical pieces, voice, and messy queers.

Jason Lipeles (he/him) is a writer, curator, and human-being-with-feelings. He co-founded the ee! with Marcella Green, a space for loving responses to zines and artbooks. He is an alumnus of Image Text Ithaca MFA; Reciprocity Artist Retreat; and Institute for Jewish Creativity. His chapbook, Letters to M., a finalist for the Chautauqua Janus Prize, was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Literary Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. jasonlipeles.com 

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.

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.

Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is author of Revelations, Next Extinct Mammal, and translator of Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. His writing appears in Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He has served as an editor and coordinator for The Rumpus, Kenyon Review. AGNI, Pleiades, Publishing Triangle Awards, and PEN America Literary Awards. He hosts a monthly literary broadcast called the Mercy Street Readings and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Chicago.

Matthew Clark Davison is the author of Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21). He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend’s living room in San Francisco. The textbook version of The Lab, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, will be published by W.W. Norton. His prose has been in or on Lambda Literary, The Advocate, Literary Hub, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, Cultural Equities Grant, Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award. Matthew earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time.

Natalia M. Vigil is a queer Xicana writer with native heritage, multimedia curator, and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is an arts administrator passionate about community-driven creativity and cultural preservation through artist sustainability. She is the Executive Director of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco and the co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

Arisa White is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. Most recently, she is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Arisa’s work has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Book Award, California Book Award, and an NAACP Image Award. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that center queer BIPOC narratives. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press and is a community advisory board member for MWPA. arisawhite.com

William Johnson is the PEN Across America program director at PEN America. A longtime steward in the writing community, Johnson was the editor and publisher of Mary Literary, a literary magazine committed to showcasing work of artistic integrity. He also co-produced Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, the first major anthology for queer poets of color in the United States. In 2011, Johnson began his tenure at Lambda Literary, an organization dedicated to promoting LGBTQ literature. As the deputy director of Lambda Literary, Johnson oversaw many of the organization’s most dynamic programs and public events, including the Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and Lambda’s web magazine, the Lambda Literary Review.

In 2021, Johnson was awarded The Publishing Triangle’s Leadership Award, an award recognizing contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, such as editors, agents, librarians, and institutions.

Alicia Mountain’s debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy to win the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Four in Hand (BOA Editions, forthcoming early 2023). Her chapbook, Thin Fire (BOAAT Press), was selected by Natalie Diaz. Dr. Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver and the 2020-21 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. Mountain is a contributing editor at the Kenyon Review. She is a lesbian poet, based in New York City where she teaches at Columbia University and in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s College. Keep up with her on twitter at @HiGroundCoward. Alicia uses she/her pronouns and her name is pronounced “a-lish-a,” the middle syllable rhyming with fish or dish.

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

Sandhya Ramnan (they/them) is a queer Malaysian poet working on their BA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where they were a staff member on Transfer magazine. Outside of procrastinating on writing, you can find them trying to perfect baking eclairs, buying notebooks they will never use or adopting the stray cats of the neighborhood.

K-Ming Chang (she/her) is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook BONE HOUSE was released by Bull City Press. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World on July 10, 2022. 

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work (2020). She was chosen as a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction Prize for Indiana Review in 2020, and is a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers in 2021. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Apogee Journal, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Dez Deshaies (he/him) is a writer, game designer, and youth advocate from Chicago. His writing has appeared in Foglifter, The Heartland Review, Menacing Hedge, and elsewhere. His multimedia/games work has been exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art and the Adler Planetarium. Currently, he’s at work on a novel about boy bands. He is on Instagram and Twitter @dezdeshaies.