malia l. koh doesn’t fit into boxes. A Korean adoptee who grew up in rural Northern and now resides in urban Southern California, she received her masters degree in chemistry and now teaches at her local college. Always an avid reader, she devoured stories about women history deemed “too much”, and writes worlds and characters that refuse to adapt in kind. When she’s not out training for her next race or gaming to let loose her competitive streak, she’s drawing constellations and chasing unicorn sightings with her husband and two “halo-halo” children.
As a writer, she gravitates toward stories that similarly cross boundaries: fantasies interwoven with romance and political intrigue that center around powerful women that the world has tried to diminish, and what it costs them to hold their space inside systems that require them to be something other than they are.
My stories start with a character and a song, and then evolve into a question. My first love is epic fantasy, with a penchant for worlds of rich court politics, questions of power and duty and morality, and populated by characters bearing the impossible weight of being human. Most often I tell stories through multiple perspectives to filter truth through self and to explore how often what isn’t said is more significant than what’s visible.
Check out my Contacts page. I am represented by Mary C. Moore of Aevitas Creative Management.
I first read The Iliad at eleven, and haven’t stopped thinking about how Achilles’ most human acts are how it begins and ends.
Eowyn of Rohan is my ride or die.
I am a perennial fan of the original BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
Over half the books on my shelf are biographies, and primarily about royal or royal-adjacent women: Caterina Sforza, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Tudor, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth Woodville, Joanna of Castille, to name a few.
My central cinema touchstones are the silent longing in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, the iconography of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, and the response to tragedy in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.