Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of Helen House (Burrow Press 2022), a queer horror novelette. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, and others. She was a 2021 nonfiction fellow and a 2023 speculative fiction writer in residence at Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. She is currently a Tin House Reading Fellow.