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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.
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.
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.
Christine No 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Anna Allen, from Stockton, California, is a performance poet. She’s been published in Sparkle and Blink, little death lit, Chronicling Lit and others. Her poetry reflects the darkness and light that has been part of her life from the beginning.
Rhea Dhanbhoora worked for close to a decade as editor and writer in print and digital content for a variety of clients, before quitting her job and moving to New York to get her master’s degree, and finally writing the stories everyone told her no one would ever read. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in publications such as The Hindu, Quint, The Apeiron Review, sPARKLE & bLINK, Awakened Voices, Five on the Fifth, Capsule Stories, Fly on the Wall Press, HrStry, and JMWW. She’s currently working on a linked collection about women based in the underrepresented Parsi Zoroastrian diaspora.
Kevin Dublin is a writer of poetry, prose, scripts, and code originally from the small town of Smithfield, NC. His words have recently appeared in The Racket, Cincinnati Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Sparkle + Blink, and he is author of the chapbook How to Fall in Love in San Diego (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Kevin holds an MFA from San Diego State, leads workshops all over the bay area, including Litquake’s Elder Writing Project, and enjoys making video adaptations of poetry and developing web apps for writers.
Tom Pyun (he/him/his) is a writer and nonprofit worker living in San Francisco. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Anthology award. Tom has completed fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and Tin House. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Rumpus and Joyland and placed in competitions such as The Blue Mesa Review‘s Summer Story Contest. Tom has degrees from Vassar and Columbia and an MFA from Antioch University-Los Angeles.
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
