Iliria Osum is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up on Lenape territory in New Jersey and currently works and lives on unceded Kumeyaay land in Southern California. In 2022, she received her MFA in Writing from UC San Diego. She teaches, volunteers as a restorative justice facilitator/coordinator in her community, and spends a lot of time thinking about jokes.

...Look, can I be real with you? Trying to articulate a professional identity—trying to develop and perform a "brand"—has been my personal nightmare since I first tried to use Twitter in, like, 2013. But I can tell you what I'm working on:

• publishing a novel about an Albanian-American young woman who accidentally goes viral on YouTube (it's 2008; YouTube's still relevant) when she is struck unexpectedly with stigmata
• writing a murder mystery in which a New York real estate mogul is killed while drinking champagne on a 40' Cape Dory floating off the coast of downeast Maine
• sending out excerpts from a chapbook-length experimental poem about teaching, gun violence in classrooms, and true crime as an archival genre
• trying really hard to convince people that the movie IT: Chapter Two is a modernist text, and trying really hard to convince various journals that autotheoretical criticism is the right method to approach classic modernist text IT: Chapter Two
• developing a play about Lolita (yes, that Lolita) who has grown into an adult comedienne (already produced as a one-woman show, Little Claws, but my collaborator and I are turning it into a four-hander)
• making weird little projects of all kinds, including this website!

If that seems like the kind of thing you like to dish about, or if by some bizarre chance you're an agent, please send me an e-mail!