Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of short fiction, essays, and pop culture criticism living in Florida. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Joyland, Vice, Vulture, and others. She was a 2021 nonfiction fellow for Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Helen House is her first book.