Quarantine Storytime // Miah Jeffra

During the Shelter in Place, CLA is presenting live readings online with poets, writers, and translators, and the local presses who publish them.

Our final event features Miah Jeffra, author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic: Essays (Sibling Rivalry Press) and The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press). Miah’s reading will be streamed on Facebook Live and Instagram Live on Thursday, June 4 at 7PM.

Praise for The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic:

“Miah Jeffra is that rare writer who’s as committed to the individual sentence as much as he is to developing a bold, animated vision. These short pieces are nothing less than an ongoing art of survival, and they’re irresistible in their force, innovation, and vulnerability.” — Paul Lisicky

Praise for The First Church of What’s Happening:

“Miah Jeffra does not use his imagination to protect himself or to protect us. Instead, he gives us stories of reckless tenderness and anger and sorrow and lust—that overflow with images of wonder and desire. How wonderful!” –Robert Glück

Miah Jeffra is a writer, artist, curator and educator, currently living in San Francisco. A military brat, Jeffra moved throughout their childhood, but most identifies the South as home.

They spent their high school years in Baltimore, and then moved to Atlanta, where they studied English, Music and Theatre at Oglethorpe University.

Miah later studied in the MFA Writing Program in Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and the MA program in English at San Francisco State University. Jeffra teaches Writing, Drama, Media and Cultural Studies at Santa Clara University and The San Francisco Art Institute, and is Founding Editor and Production Designer for queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.

Jeffra finds interest in community-centered arts and discourse and chooses to maintain a multi-disciplinary studio practice for its collaborative possibilities. The subjects of their work range from psycho-geography, urban studies and class to gender structures and whiteness as oppressive construct. Influences include Augusto Boal, Anna Deavere Smith, Richard Rodriguez, Peter Brook, Angela Davis, Richard Schechner, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colum McCann, Olafur Eliasson, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Goode, West African dance forms, and other artists/writers who emphasize process in their work.