Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s 2021 second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a New York Times editor’s choice. Her novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, published by Macmillan, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Today, Alta, the Chicago Review of Books, and The Millions. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno. [Fiction]