Join us for The Ruby’s Litcrawl stop!
The theme for the night is "The Body." Ruby readers will be sharing an exploration of our corporeal sensations and identities, asking what do we hold and feel and live through in the bodies we inhabit?
Simileoluwa Adebajo is the 28 year old Executive Chef and CEO of Eko Kitchen - San Francisco’s first Nigerian restaurant and catering company in addition to two other business ventures. She moved to San Francisco in 2016 from Lagos Nigeria to pursue a master’s degree at USF but stayed to share Nigeria with the city through food, music, and art at her restaurant. She is passionate about community feeding and being a bridge between Nigeria and the United States. She has been writing since her teenage years and has several published works including magazines, a cookbook, and an autobiography. In her spare times she loves to work out, read, paint, dance, travel, and enjoy her life. She is the 2nd of 4 children and lives in Los Angeles, California.
Alana Noelle Black is a writer and editor based in the East Bay. Her creative work focuses primarily on Black women navigating relationships (including with themselves) in the present day. She has published fiction in the Susquehanna Review and humor in the Belladonna Comedy.
Celeste Chan is an artist and writer, schooled by Do-It-Yourself culture and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. For ten years, Celeste co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. She served as long-standing guest curator for MIX NYC Experimental Film Festival and OUTsider Festival (2012-2018), and screened work at film festivals in Montreal, Tijuana, Korea, Berlin, and beyond. Celeste toured the West Coast with Sister Spit, and facilitated LGBTQ history workshops for youth through Queer Ancestors Project. She is now focused on writing her family memoir.
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA in fiction from NYU. Her novel about an infamous Chinese pirate queen, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, is a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, an Indie Next pick, and Good Morning America Buzz Pick for June 2023 as well as an Indies Introduce pick for Summer/Fall 2023. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Writers Grotto, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.
Kar Johnson is a writer, performer, and bookseller in San Francisco. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from L’Éphémère Review, Foglifter, and the Red Light Lit anthology Love is the Drug and Other Dark Poems. They hold an MFA from San Francisco State University and serve as the events coordinator for Green Apple Books.
Keana Aguila Labra is a non-binary, queer Cebuana Tagalog Filipinx genre- and genderfluid poet, editor, and writer in diaspora residing on stolen Ohlone Tamyen land. She works to provide a safe literary space for underserved and underrepresented communities as co-Editor-in-Chief of literary magazine, Marías at Sampaguitas and co-Founder of the BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ focused independent publishing house, Sampaguita Press. Outside of MAS & SAM, they are the co-Director of the Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate Program alongside Janice Lobo Sapigao and Karla Reyes-Santiago. She served as one of the Honorary Santa Clara County Poets Laureate in Oct. ’21 alongside Lorenz Mazon Dumuk. Her poetry was nominated for Best of Net in 2019 and 2020. They worked to bring jazz education to the students of the Franklin-McKinley District with nonprofit San José Jazz for the 2022-2023 school year. They are the current SVCreates SVLaureate & Content Emerging Artist for 2023. She is also a proud recipient of the Lucas Artists Residency Program Fellowship through Montalvo Arts Center and the So-Youn Kim Creative in Residence Fellowship through the Ruby. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks, No Saints (Lazy Adventurer Publishing, 2020) and Mohilak (Fahmidan Co. & Publishing, 2021) and Kanunay (Self-Published, 2022).
Alexia Nader is a writer from Miami, Florida. Her writing has been published in Obsidian, Your Impossible Voice and Guernica among other publications. A 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, she is working on her first novel.
Abi Ramanan was born in India, raised in the UK, and has lived in San Francisco since 2018. In a narrowly won race, she chose fiction writing over bread baking during the pandemic, and (mostly) hasn't looked back since! Her journalism and short stories have appeared in Vice, The New Statesman, JaggeryLit, Thawra and No Parties magazine. Additionally, her short story The Orb was shortlisted in the Hammond House international literary fiction competition in 2020. She was selected as a winner of the Space to Write Project in 2022 for her debut novel-in-progress, Prophet, a project of speculative fiction about emotion transference, which she is currently taking a break to work on.