San Francisco Writers Grotto Fellow Reading

Join us for an amazing night of readings from the 2016 Grotto Fellows

Chad Koch is a founding editor of Foglifter, San Francisco’s only queer literary journal. He recently received his MFA from San Francisco State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Fourteen Hills. His most recent stories were published in The North American Review and Sparkle & Blink. His story, “Lost Boys” was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Raymond Carver Short Story Award.

Caleb Leisure received his MFA in Fiction from New York University. In 2011 he was named a NYC Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction, and in 2014 he won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. He works for a small winery in Sonoma County and is at work on his first novel. He lives in Oakland.

Marissa Ortega-Welch is a freelance radio producer in Oakland, California. Her stories have aired on NPR’s Latino USA, KQED, and KPFA. She is currently the health reporter for KALW Public Radio. She’s also worked for years as a teacher and naturalist and is drawn to stories about the environment, youth, and informal economies.

Lisa Marie Rollins is playwright, poet and freelance director. Most recently she directed a reading of Tearrance Chisholm’s Br’er Cotton (Playwrights Foundation) and is co-Director of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (Crowded Fire). She is the director of All Atheists are Muslim by Zahra Noorbakhsh and was co-producer of W. Kamau Bell’s “Ending Racism in About and Hour”. She was Poet in Residence at June Jordan’s Poetry for the People at U.C. Berkeley, a CALLALOO Journal London Writing Workshop Fellow and an alumni in Poetry of VONA Writing Workshop. Her writing is published in Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, River, Blood, Corn Literary Journal, Line/Break, As/Us Literary Journal, The Pacific Review and others. Currently, she is finishing her new manuscript of poems, Compass for which she received the 2016 Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award from SF Foundation. She is an Adjunct Professor at SFSU in Race and Resistance Studies. Lisa Marie is a 2015-16 member of Just Theater Play Lab and Artist-in-Residence at BRAVA Theater for Women in San Francisco. @thirdrootprod

Kaitlin Solimine’s debut novel, Empire of Glass, is forthcoming in Summer 2017 (Ig Publishing). Raised in New England, she has considered China a second home for two decades. She has received the Yenching scholarship, Fulbright Fellowship, and Bread Loaf’s Donald E. Axinn Scholarship. A graduate of Harvard University and the MFA program at UC-San Diego, she has published fiction and non-fiction in National Geographic News, The Wall Street Journal, Guernica Magazine, Kartika Review, China Daily, and numerous anthologies. She recently returned from living in Singapore and now resides in San Francisco where she is co-founder of HIPPO Reads, a network connecting academic insights to the wider public.