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, a queer horror novelette. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the assistant managing editor at TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear/are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, and others. Some of her pop culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She attended the 2020 and 2021 Tin House Summer Workshops for short fiction, the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for fiction, and was a 2021 nonfiction fellow for Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Her Catapult column Muscle Memories explores her complicated relationship with blockbuster action movies.