Visiting Professor/Advisor
Miah Jeffra is author of four books—most recently the short story collection The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, winner of the Clark-Gross Award—and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, storySouth, jubilat and many others. Select awards include the New Millennium Fiction Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, Oregon Writers Colony Nonfiction Prize, as well as several fellowships and grants, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Essays. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
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 Humanities, Music and Performance at Oglethorpe University. Miah later studied in the MFA Critical Studies program at the California Institute of the Arts and the MA program in English at San Francisco State University.
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, bell hooks, Anna Deavere Smith, Richard Rodriguez, Mieke Bal, Peter Brook, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Angela Davis, Richard Schechner, James Baldwin, David Wojnarowicz, Shigenori Nagatomo, Judith Butler, Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colum McCann, Olafur Eliasson, Yuasa Yasuo, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Goode, several West African dance forms, and other artists/writers who emphasize process in their work.
You can read more about Miah at www.miahjeffra.com