somafrazier

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is between homes, relocating from California—where she’s served as a San Francisco Library Laureate—to New York, for a professorship at SUNY Oswego. Frazier’s work has earned nods and awards from authors and entities ranging from Nikki Giovanni to Daniel Handler; HBO to Zoetrope: All-Story; Glimmer Train and ZYZZYVA to the Mississippi Review. She is nose-to-grindstone on a novel and a screenplay, and is final judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest.

Soma’s third prose chapbook, Don’t Give Up on Alan Greenspan, was selected as the winner of CutBank‘s 2018 contest and released in 2019. Her previous fiction chapbooks—Salve (Nomadic Press) and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (RopeWalk Press)—earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket, Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea and others.

Soma’s writing has been singled out by HBO, Robert Olen Butler, Jim Shepard, Frederick Barthelme and others. 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. 

You can find her work online at Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven and Kore Press – or read 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. 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.)

Before returning to her native East Coast, Soma served as Chair and Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Cogswell 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 that she ran with her undergraduate students at Cogswell, which has featured Dave Eggers, Opal Palmer Adisa, Gish Jen, Denise Duhamel and many more.