Meliza Bañales (She/They)
Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego is an author, advocate, and adventurer.
She was a 2016 Lambda Literary Finalist for Best LGBTQ Debut Fiction for her novel Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific (Ladybox Books). She was a fixture in the spoken- word, slam, and Queer artist communities of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1996 until 2011, touring with Sister Spit and Body Heat, as well as competing on three national slam teams ('98, '99, & '02) and winning Grand Slam Champion in 2002. She earned her BA with Honors in Literature, Creative Writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000. She earned an MFA in Poetry and an MA in English from San Francisco State University in 2003.
They have written and directed short films, and were the inaugural winner with their best friend, J Aguilar, of the Jury Award at the Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival in 2011. They were a core member of Con Fuerza Collective in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles from 2015-2016. They served as a Lecturer in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego from 2015-2020. Her current chapbook is Adventure Awaits You In Hell with a foreword from their best friend, R Stranger. This year they have poetry forthcoming in the Jota Anthology from Koríma Press and non-fiction in The Washington Square Review.
Their third, full-length book, Root for the Underdog: Poems, will arrive in the Fall of 2022 on spdbooks. They live in Los Angeles, CA, USA.