Azia Archer is a Minnesota-based novelist, poet, and artist.

She is the author of the poetry collection Atoms and Evers (dancinggirlpress, 2017), and her poetry, fiction, essays, and art have appeared in more than eighty journals and anthologies. Azia writes from lived experience and close attention to the world around her, often exploring grief, motherhood, complicated relational dynamics, and the thread of humanity that connects us all.

She is the editor and curator of Root Smoke, an online literary journal that publishes work from both emerging and established voices. Root Smoke has become a community shaped by a shared love of language and the arts. It is currently ranked #23 in Rising in Fiction on Substack.

Beyond the page, Azia is equally devoted to making art and working with the natural world. She lives on a five-acre homestead with her husband, five children, two cats, and a black lab. She tends multiple gardens and a flock of chickens, makes plant medicine, and grounds herself in the rhythm of the seasons.

Azia is currently querying Small Birds, which she hopes will be her debut novel. A work of upmarket women’s fiction with speculative elements, it follows Tulip Finn, a grieving painter who begins slipping between two versions of her life. The novel explores the afterlife of grief, the doubleness of love, and the fragile seam between memory and possibility.

She recently completed the first draft of her second novel, Dream Date, an expansion of a short story she wrote years ago. Dream Date is an unsettling tale about loneliness, celebrity worship, and the algorithms that promise to love us back.