Quiet Lightning is a San Francisco-based literary nonprofit now in our 14th year. We’ve evolved over the last decade but remain true to our spirit: an accessible community platform for creative expression of all kinds.
Started in 2019, the Disruptors program – a limited-term board membership open to the public – is a way to regularly bring new ideas and energy into our organization. After a successful pilot round, which brought on four new members for a year, the board decided to restructure so that in 2020-2021 Disruptors account for 4/9 of our board votes. You can read more here.
The Disruptors program was put on pause during the peak of the pandemic, as we scaled back our programming, but we’ll be looking to re-open it soon. If you’re interested, please send us a line.
Disruptors 2020
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.
Anna, Rhea, Kevin and Tom were the curators for our 2021 literary mixtapes! Each person took ownership of a show and invited a co-curator of their choice. These events were held on February 1, May 3, August 2, and November 1 – click on the date to read or watch.
Disruptors 2019
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 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.
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.
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.