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Evan Karp, Executive Director
Evan Karp is the creator and executive director of Quiet Lightning, which the Los Angeles Review of Books has called “collective alchemy,” and the founding editor of Litseen, recognized by the New York Times as a go-to, near-comprehensive source for Bay Area literary events. He’s covered literary culture in columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF/Arts, and SF Weekly, and his writing has appeared in Guardian UK, BOMBlog, Eleven Eleven, and many other places. Also an events producer, Evan has managed front of house at SOMArts Cultural Center and at The Emerald Tablet, where he developed both of their interdisciplinary performance series, Under the Influence and Call and Response, and is currently events manager at Booksmith, The Bindery, and Berkeley Arts & Letters. He combines music and writing with his brother Miles as Turk & Divis and with Maw Shein Win as Vata & the Vine.
Chris Cole, Managing Director
Chris Cole is a father, a writer, and the NBA 6th man of the year three years running. Wait, scratch that last thing. He does run the West Coast office for a killer User Experience Agency called EffectiveUI and he coaches West Marin Little League games like nobody’s business. And, he is nice to animals. He’s also co-founder of Pints and Prose, the Fairfax-based reading series founded by the Tuesday Night Writers. That makes seventy-five words.
Meghan Thornton, Treasurer
Meghan Thornton is a writer and visual effects artist originally from Chicago. She first became involved in Quiet Lightning as a reader, performing at the inaugural show in December 2009, and now serves as a board member and Treasurer. She writes both poetry and fiction, and has a series of novels in the works.
Kelsey Schimmelman, Secretary
Kelsey Schimmelman holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she specialized in creative writing and literary theory. Kelsey is a compulsive diarist, community enthusiast and conference organizer. Former contributing editor to Spectrum Literary Magazine, she currently curates and manages GitHub’s San Francisco event space and produces events designed to galvanize the local open source and art communities.
Christine No, Producer / Assistant Managing Director
Christine was born and bred in Los Angeles, CA. but has called New Mexico, New York City and now Oakland her home. She holds her BA in creative writing from the College of Santa Fe and her MFA in Film from the American Film Institute. By day she is a producer of films, commercials and media content. By night, she is usually hungry and sleepy. Christine’s film projects have shown at the Sundance Film Festival, in VOD/theaters, in exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California and recently in exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum. Her writing has appeared in Writing Without Walls, Tayo Literary Magazine, Catch & Release, sPARKLE+bLINK, STORY, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Christine is an Aries, likes the colors blue and grey and Moroccan food. She has long conversations with her dog Brandeh, because Brandeh is people. When you meet Christine, ask her to talk in her dog’s voice. (She’ll do it.)
Lisa Church, Producer / Curator Liaison
Lisa Church has spent years as a non-writer fan of the rich offerings available in the Bay Area literary and arts communities She finds volunteering is a good way to participate in and promote those communities, and served on Litquake’s Executive Committee prior to joining the Quiet Lightning Board, serving as co-producer of the 2014 San Francisco Lit Crawl. Lisa is a Board Member on the San Francisco Chapter of Northern California ACLU and a Texting Team Lead for the National People Power (ACLU’s grassroots volunteer army) Team. She raised her daughter in San Francisco, where she lives and works as a Director of Operations in Financial Services.
Edmund Zagorin, Disruptor
Elizeya Quate (Edmund Zagorin) is a writer dwelling mysteriously both inside and outside this exact sentence. Quate’s work has appeared in Joyland, Entropy, Big Lucks, Sleepingfish, sparkle + blink, the 2016 novel The Face of Our Town (Kernpunkt Press) and the 2018 chapbook cra-que-lure (Finishing Line Press). A resident of Schema, Quate hosts the monthly performance art event Make It Look Like An Accident.
Katie Tandy, Disruptor
Katie Tandy is a writer, editor, songbird, and sandtrap where anything interesting is invited to stop by and stay forever. She is the former cofounding editor of Ravishly and The Establishment, a publication championing marginalized voices and creators. She recently mounted her new rock musical ‘Galatea’—a modern adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’—at CounterPulse in San Francisco as part of their spring co-production program. She is currently working on a memoir collection.
Hadas Goshen, Disruptor
Hadas Goshen is the founder and host of the YouTube Monthly Open Mic and has performed with multiple national poetry slam teams, representing Berkeley, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and UC Berkeley at National Poetry Slam competitions and placing third in the nation at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. She has toured and featured internationally as a slam poet, though she currently enjoys reading at non-slam Bay Area events such as The Racket at Adobe Books, Red Lit Light, and of course the electric evenings with Quiet Lightning!! A former journalist, Hadas has been published in The New York Times, CNN, and the Oprah Magazine. In September, she put out her first chapbook, Catch & Release.
Sophia Passin, Disruptor
Sophia Passin can be found swimming in the bay on a sunny day. Sophia recently received her Bachelor’s in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco where she helped curate the 2018 and 2019 editions of The Ignatian Literary Magazine. A few pieces of hers can be found nestled in Paris Atlantic. She aims to one day make a multi-media lit mag of her own.
Brandon Loberg, Design
Since 2007 Brandon Loberg has published The 16th & Mission Review, a submission-based literary journal featuring writing performed at the 16th & Mission street arts workshop and distributed free of charge. To facilitate production of the Review, Loberg organized seven7h tangent, a collective of volunteer artists and writers, which published several books from writers in the Mission literary community. Loberg also performs graphic design work for The Beat Museum, where he’s worked since 2006.
Connie Zheng, Art Director
Connie Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker currently based out of Oakland, California. She has presented scholarly work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and exhibited her visual work at venues around the U.S., including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), and C24 Gallery (New York). Her writing has appeared on SFMOMA’s Open Space platform, Art Practical and in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and she has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, where she is currently a Graduate Fellow.
Emeritus Board
