Toastmaster – Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson is a Bram Stoker nominated poet and award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror. Author of the Bram Stoker nominated The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry (Dooky Zines).2022) Happiness and Other Diseases (Mocha Memoirs Press 2022), and the LOHR Reader’s Choice Award-winning collection Within Me Without Me (Dooky Zines, 2022), and the novel . Winner of the HWA Scholarship from Hell (2016) BCC Voice “Reframing the Other” contest (2017), Mixy Award (2017),  Afrosurrealist Writer Award (2018), HWA Diversity Grant (2020), LOHR Fiction Grant (2021), and the HWA Richard Laymon President’s Award (2021). They have an AA in English from Berkeley City College, write a column called “Writing While Black” for a national Black Newspaper, the San Francisco BayView is the host of the SOMA Leather & LGBT Cultural District’s “Erotic Storytelling Hour,”  and teach courses at the Speculative Fiction Academy.