THE READERS

Lisa D. Gray lives and writes in the Bay Area. Her writing focuses on intersections of blackness, womanhood, and Americaness. She won the 2018 Edgar Award, Henry Joseph Jackson Prize for Distinguished Fiction, and has earned scholarships to the Fine Arts Works Center, Voices of Our Nations Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. She is a San Francisco Writer's Grotto fellow and a founding member of Sunday Stories which curates and hosts “Brown People Don’t Read?” She serves on the planning committee for San Francisco LitCrawl. Her work appears in Mission at Tenth, As Us Literary Journal, the anthology New Haven Noir and she's a contributor to the book 642 Tiny Things to Write About. She earned her BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in English & Creative Writing from Mills College.

Kirin Khan is a writer living in Oakland, CA who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. An alum of the 2016 VONA/Voices and 2017 Las Dos Brujas workshops, she is a 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, and 2018 AWP Writer to Writer Mentee. Her work has appeared in The Margins, sPARKLE & bLINK, Your Impossible Voice, and 7x7.LA. Kirin was recently named as a 2018 Steinbeck Fellow. She is working on her first novel.

Ploi Pirapokin was born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong. Her work is featured in Tor.com, Apogee Journal, the Bellingham Review, Cleaver Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Capacity Fund, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, Kundiman and others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University and is based in San Francisco.

Jasmine H. Wade is obsessed with the ridiculous, and oftentimes traumatic, trials of growing up. Her short stories have appeared in Drunken Boat, TAYO Literary Magazine, Lunch Ticket, The Copperfield Review and others. Her work is also included or forthcoming in the anthologies Little Letters on the Skin and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Volume 2. She is an alumna of VONA/Voices and Mills College’s MFA program. She has won the 2016 Edward P. Jones Short Story Contest and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers and the Tu Books New Visions Award. When she’s not writing, she’s usually buying or reading more used books than she has space. She is currently a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.