Mahru Elahi

Known for their big laugh, Mahru is a queer Iranian American femme whose writing sprouts from a desire to love on themselves and their SWANA—Southwest Asian North African—community in diaspora. She has received support from Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers Retreat, Hedgebrook, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Antioch University Los Angeles, and the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. Their poetry and nonfiction prose appear in Fireweed, the museum of americana, MUTHA, Hyphen, as well as the anthologies Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose. A former poet-in-the-schools, high school English teacher, and the current Managing Editor of Content and Production for Lunch Ticket, a literary and art journal from the MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles, Mahru lives in Oakland with their son.