SFIAF presents its first ever literary event using the IN DIASPORA: I.D. for the New Majority theme as its inspiration. Six women authors whose family journeys began in five different countries (China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Iran and Sri Lanka) present their powerful stories on the SFIAF stage and bring a wealth of cultural diversity and richness to the Festival program. The program was curated by writer and literary translator Joel Streicker and the evening marks the first time the Festival has used the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Bookstore as a venue for performances.

Nancy Au (Author)
Nancy Au's essays and stories appear in many journals, including Craft Literary, Redivider, Gulf Coast, Catapult, Foglifter, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing (to biology majors!) at California State University Stanislaus, and in the Fall began teaching at San Francisco State University. She is co-founder of The Escapery, a writing and art unschool. Her flash fiction is included in the Best Small Fictions 2018 anthology, and in The Vestal Review as the winner of their 2018 VERA Flash Fiction Prize. Her flash also won Redivider's 2018 Blurred Genre Contest. Her debut full-length collection, Spider Love Song & Other Stories (Acre Books, University of Cincinnati, September 2019), was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection. www.peascarrots.com

May-lee Chai (Author and moderator)
May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her short prose has appeared widely, including in the Paris Review online, Longreads, Lenny Letter, Seventeen, and ZYZZYVA. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and recipient of an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.

Juli Delgado Lopera (Author)
Juli Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker, and storyteller based in San Francisco. She’s the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. She's received fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for The Arts and The SF Grotto. She's received two individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission, a 2019 Ebony McKinney Award and was the recipient of the 2016 Jeanne Córdova Words Scholarship. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, to name a few. She’s the former executive director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco. Her debut novel Fiebre Tropical, which won the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, was recently published by The Feminist Press.

Anita Felicelli (Author)
Anita Felicelli is a Tamil American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. She is the author of a short story collection LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. She is also the author of CHIMERICA: A NOVEL. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, Joyland, The Normal School, The Rumpus, Belletrist Magazine, Juked, Terrain, Kweli Journal, the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Slate, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. She has received multiple Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards, and she received a Puffin Foundation grant for poetry in 2011. Anita was born in South India and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her family.

Meron Hadero (Author)
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American Steinbeck Fellow whose short stories have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize and appear in Best American Short Stories, Selected Shorts, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and other journals. Her writing has also been published in The New York Times Book Review, the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and others. Meron has held fellowships at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, where she received an NEA award. She appeared in San Francisco Magazine’s 2018 feature “Making Waves: 100 Artists Putting the East Bay on the Map.” Meron holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies.