Miah Jeffra is a writer, curator, educator and culture jammer from Baltimore, currently living in San Francisco. They are author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), the chapbook The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Awards include the New Millennium Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Outstanding Anthology. Most recent work can be seen in The North American Review, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, DIAGRAM, The Boiler, Barrelhouse, The Forge and Interim. Miah is a founding editor of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.

Miah has written, published and presented nonfiction, fiction and poetry, with particular focus on cross-genre work, concerning such themes as gentrification & displacement, systemic racism, violence, and poverty. There is also special attention to how perception, language and memory shape our realities.

Miah loves the outdoors, and would go camping every weekend if they didn’t also love getting lost in museums and writing ekphrastic poems in their notebook. They also never turn down a road trip, a bucket of fried chicken, or a chance to play with an acetylene torch. In between all of these temptations, you can see them dancing to any beat, but they formally were trained in the Ghanaian dance of the Kpanlogo drum.

Some of their favorite authors? Toni Morrison, Ron Rash, James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Michael Cunningham, Bhanu Kapil, Aimee Bender, Annie Proulx, Claudia Rankine, Carson McCullers, Donika Kelly, William Faulkner, Carson Beker, Arisa White, Ana Castillo—oh, so many.

Miah is currently reading The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis and Look by Solmaz Sharif

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Selected & Forthcoming Works: 

• Essay collection: The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic

• The anthology I edited with Arisa White and Monique Mero-Williams: Home is Where You Queer Your Heart