Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of Helen House (Burrow Press). She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, 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, 2021, and 2023 Tin House Summer Workshops for short fiction, was a 2021 nonfiction fellow for Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and will be the 2023 speculative writer-in-residence at Lambda.
