Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s debut novel, Off the Books, was included in Bustle‘s 40 Most Anticipated Books of summer 2024 and has earned positive reviews from The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and others. Her essays and interviews appear in People Magazine, Electric Literature and Literary Hub (LitHub). (Note: Soma did not write the title or subtitle used by People Magazine. The essay’s original title is “Flowers From Family.”)  

Soma has published three prose chapbooks: Salve, Don’t Give Up on Alan Greenspan and Collateral Damage: A Triptych. You can also find her writing in ZYZZYVA, Hyphen, Story, Glimmer Train, The Mississippi Review, Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Kore Press and elsewhere — or read her interviews with CBS, SF Weekly, Women’s Quarterly Conversation and more. Her poems and stories have earned numerous awards and accolades; been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and named Notable by the storySouth Million Writers Award. Her screenplays have earned nods from HBO, Screencraft, Bluecat and the International Screenwriters Association.

In 2019, Soma relocated from California — where she served as a San Francisco Library Laureate — to New York. Here, she founded Subnivean, SUNY Oswego’s undergraduate-staffed, digital literary publication, which the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses named one of four national finalists in the Firecracker Awards category Magazines: Best Debut. Before joining SUNY Oswego’s faculty, Soma taught at the University of San Francisco, University of Silicon Valley, Oakland School for the Arts, Holy Names University, Gavilan College, the Sarah Lawrence College Summer High School Writers Program and Valhalla Women’s Correctional Facility, and worked at KQED, a premier national public media source located in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Education

• BA: Pomona College
• MFA, Writing: Sarah Lawrence College

Classes taught

• CRW 300 Living Writers Series (Fall 2023)
• CRW 313 Digital Storytelling (Fall 2023)
• CRW 206 Fiction Writing: Introductory (Spring 2024)
• CRW 301 Screenwriting: Intermediate (Spring 2024)
• CRW 395 Subnivean: Digital Literary Publishing (Spring 2024)