K.M. Soehnlein's Blog

When news of the death of the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich arrived today in the form of a tweet, I was stunned. Stunned that this vital poet—still actively publishing in her 82nd year—could be gone. Stunned because Rich's 50...

Introducing Temporary Shelter: a collection of interwoven stories that I edited and wrote with ten writers in my seminar at the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing Program. Buy the book on Lulu.com. If you're in San Francisco, come...

A video has been posted of a reading I did on Sept. 11, as part of an event called Buffet Flats, a salon that mixes queer performance with the San Francisco local food & urban farming movements. The salon was...

Robin and Ruby turns one today. It was exactly a year ago that my third novel was published in hardcover. What a great year it's been. I made a book trailer, did readings in SF, LA, NYC, Philadelphia, Boston and...

I delivered these remarks to introduce the writer Jane Smiley at the Lone Mountain Reading Series, held at the University of San Francisco on March 2, 2011. I'm printing them here by request. All writers need models, not just the...

Today's New York Times casts a spotlight on the literary scene in San Francisco, with nods to the legendary, the up-and-coming, and the hidden secrets. There's even a quote from yours truly in there, where I come off sounding like...

Everyone knows The Catcher in the Rye, but the J.D. Salinger book that's meant the most to me is Franny and Zooey, in part because it's literature's greatest brother-sister story. Classic fiction gives us plenty of brothers-in-arms; contemporary novels have...

RedRoom asked writers to blog about their favorite short story. If you've read Jesus' Son—Denis Johnson's collection that follows around a drug-addled drifter named Fuckhead—you probably know "Emergency." It's the one with the guy who walks into an emergency room...

I love talking about movies almost as much as I love watching them, so the chance to share my list of favorites of the past decade is really the hope for more conversation. The films on my list (below) are mostly those I've watched more than once, and will likely watch again. This was the decade that married movie-watching with instant gratification—DVD, DVR, Netflix. I probably saw more movies in the last ten years than I'd seen in the previous twenty, and I saw them when I wanted to see...

This week's gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in
Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the
rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional
wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing
visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer
dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard's...