Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the assistant managing editor at TriQuarterly. She made her fiction debut in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and her short stories also appear/are forthcoming in Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, and others. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction and the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for fiction and was a 2021 fellow for Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.