Nancy Spiller is a Los Angeles based writer, artist and instructor with UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. She was a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News, its Sunday magazine, West, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and editor of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate’s Entertainment News Service. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, Mother Jones, Town & Country, USA Weekend, McCall’s, Cooking Light and Salon.com. Her books include Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes) (Counterpoint, 2009) and the illustrated memoir Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box (Counterpoint, 2013). She attended Squaw Valley’s Art of the Wild in 1993. www.nancyspiller.org