Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman is a bi-racial Muslim writer, poet, and artist. She holds a dual Bachelors in Creative Writing and Middle Eastern History. She is the Editor-In-Chief of Defunkt Magazine. She is a 2021 Desert Nights: Rising Stars Writers Conference Fellow through the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She was a featured performer at The Museum of Fine Arts and Houston Grand Opera’s event “The Art of Intimacy” January 16, 2020. Her fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and translation publications can be found or are forthcoming in (Fiction) Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Scintilla Magazine, Paper Trains Journal, The Bayou Review: The Women’s Issue. (Essays, interviews, and translations) Glass Mountain, Volume 21, Dead Eyes Literary Magazine Volume .01, and Defunkt Magazine. (Poetry) The Houston Review of Books, her visual art can be found in Cosumnes River Journal, Sonder Midwest Review, Wordpeace Magazine, and The Blue Minaret.

“I see objects and bodies as agents of ideas. I use text, material, and the body as critical tools to raise questions about design norms, normativity and the manner in which we interact with objects. How do our object-related behaviors affect us? What does queer design look like? How do queered objects operate or should they operate at all?”

I often find myself a bit overstimulated by life as I know it. Visual art is how I slow down and process all of the people, places, and things that ebb and flow around me – and above all else, the feelings. There is no art without feeling so at the end of the day, I am always grateful to feel. My work bounces around color pallets, allusions, and characters of all kinds – creating it feels just as fun as it is does and I only wish to inspire more whimsy in those who perceive it.