I joined the living in 1977, the only offispring of an artist couple living in the Mission district of San Francisco. Mine was an eccentric upbringing, colored by freaky characters and unusual parenting choices. Our small family bounced between the vibrant city and the secretive backwoods of the Emerald Triangle.
After highschool, I smuggled my soul out of the U.S., and discovered that I felt more at peace in foreign territory than in my own bedroom. It was during a 750km trek across the Iberian Penninsula that I started writing. Thereafter, I studied Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe and attended universities in Ecuador and Cuba. La Habana was my home for a spectacular year.
Now returned to San Francisco, I am the West Coast producer and host of Literary Death Match–a raucous international reading series. My fiction, nonfiction and translations appear in ZYZZYVA, Nerve.com, Instant City and elsewhere. I have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recently awarded The 2011 Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship.
Short Fiction forthcoming in Dark Sky Magazine.
Novel excerpt forthcoming in Instant City.
Hi Alia,
I’m a GED teacher in the Mission, and I was wondering if you could help me. This Saturday, the Mission Neighborhood Center is doing a fundraiser for my GED program. All the money we make goes to paying for our students’ testing fees. As you can imagine, our students need the financial help in order to get to the next step in their lives. Any way you could send this along to your FB peeps/real peeps? Any way I could come by to your event tonight and get you to plug the event?
I should tell you we have some great performers from the neighborhood and beyond. Norman Zelaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Miriam Speyer, Mike Capozzola, Mariama Lockington–just to name a few.
Now we need to make sure we have an audience. Can you help a Mission brother out? Here’s the link:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=190993704271894&index