somafrazier

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is an East Coast native living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as a 2017 San Francisco Library Laureate, and is final judge of the 2018 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest.

Her two fiction chapbooks, Salve (Nomadic Press) and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (RopeWalk Press), earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler (AKA Lemony Snicket), Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea and others. You can find her work online at Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven and Kore Press – or read her her interviews with CBS, SF Weekly and Women’s Quarterly Conversation. Recent stories are also available in Glimmer Train, issue 96, and ZYZZYVA, issue 106. Soma is nose-to-grindstone on a novel and a screenplay.

Soma’s writing has been singled out by HBO, Robert Olen Butler, Nikki Giovanni, Jim Shepard, Frederick Barthelme and others – and placed in literary competitions offered by Zoetrope, Glimmer Train, the Mississippi Review and more. Her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one of her award-winning short fiction pieces was named a Notable Story by the storySouth Million Writers Award authors. If poetry and fiction don’t float your boat, read Soma’s brief Glimmer Train essay on literary craft. (Writers: if you try the prompt, send Soma your results.)

Soma serves as Chair and Assistant Professor of English and the Humanities at Cogswell Polytechnical College. She has also taught at the Sarah Lawrence College Summer High School Writers Program, Holy Names University, Gavilan College, Oakland School for the Arts and Valhalla Women’s Correctional Facility – and worked at KQED, the Bay Area’s public media source. In 2015 she founded COG, a multimedia literary publication run with her undergraduate students at Cogswell, which has featured Dave Eggers, Opal Palmer Adisa, Gish Jen, Denise Duhamel and many more.