Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier's writing has earned nods from numerous authors and entities, including HBO, Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler (AKA Lemony Snicket), Billy Collins, Gish Jen, April Sinclair, Lori Ostlund, Michelle Tea and others. Her debut novel, Off the Books, is forthcoming from Henry Holt & Co. in 2024.

Before turning to novels, Soma authored three award-winning prose chapbooks: Don’t Give Up on Alan Greenspan (CutBank Press), Salve (Black Lawrence Press), and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (Ropewalk Press). Her work has also been published in Story, Glimmer Train, ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, Carve Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, and Hyphen, among 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.

Soma helped build the literary arts department at Oakland School for the Arts in California. She has taught at colleges, universities, and a correctional facility, and worked at KQED, a premier national public media source in the Bay Area. Soma and her family relocated from California, where she was a San Francisco Library Laureate, to New York. She is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Oswego, where she founded Subnivean—an internationally-known literary publication staffed by her students and nominated by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses as one of just four national 2021 Firecracker Award finalists in the category, “Magazines: Best Debut.” Soma spends her free time with her kid, driving from public park to public park to splash around in the Syracuse region’s many magnificent swimming pools.