S.M. is a writer, essayist, teacher, and book critic living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the lands of the Dakota people. They are a third-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. They have received fellowships and support for their writing from numerous institutions including Kundiman, Tin Houser, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the I-Park Foundation, American Short Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle, and Lambda Literary. Their writing has been published in Joyland, Nashville Review, Alta Journal, Chicago Review of Books, and HAD, and their essays have received notable mentions in Best American Essays 2022 anthology. In 2022, Sukardi co-founded Soapberry Review, a journal for reviews and criticism of Asian American literature, because they wanted to understand the community in which they wrote, to examine its work critically, but to also participate in criticism as an act of attention and advocacy. Through Soapberry Review, they’ve solicited, edited, and published over one hundred reviews of contemporary Asian American books.
Formally trained as a scientist, Sukardi also has degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. A non-traditional writer, they began writing in their mid-twenties and worked for several years as an engineer before pursuing graduate studies in writing. They are currently working on an essay collection exploring estrangement via the lenses of queerness, Christianity, and Asian American identity.