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.

Reach Dan at poetry@foglifterpress.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

A graduate of SFSU’s Creative Writing program, Matthew DeCoster (he/him) served as an instructional aide and staffer on Fourteen Hills. He’s been published in sPARJKLE & bLINK, Full of Crow, Harlot’s Sauce and SFWIRE. Matthew served on the Litquake committee for several years where he produced, curated and hosted WRITE ON and Barely Published Authors. He was an original staffer and founding board member of Lit Camp. Matthew is a producer for Literary Death Match. He lives in the Castro with his partner of 25 years, Matthew Carhart.

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

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.

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.

Nefertiti Asanti (they/she) is a poet born and raised in the Bronx and a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Nefertiti’s work can be found at AfroPunk, Santa Clara Review, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, Nefertiti serves as prose poetry editor for Stellium Literary Magazine. nefertitiasanti.com

Jody Chan (they/them) is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award. They can be found online at www.jodychan.com and offline in bookstores or dog parks.