Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Guest/Teaching Artist
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is the managing editor of the LGBTQ+ magazine Autostraddle and the assistant managing editor at the literary journal TriQuarterly. She made her fiction debut in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and her short stories also appear/are forthcoming in Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, and others. Some of her pop culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction and the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for fiction and was a 2021 nonfiction fellow for Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Her Catapult column MUSCLE MEMORIES explores her complicated relationship with blockbuster action movies. Her upcoming chapbook Helen House will be published by Burrow Press in fall 2022.