Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection of short fiction, Some Final Beauty and other Stories is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals including Air/Light, Anacapa Review, Huizache, So It Goes, and in anthologies including most recently, Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press) and Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters (Stanford University Press) edited by David Kipen. She has edited three anthologies including Why to These Rocks: 50 years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College where she co-directs the Puente Program. She co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers and serves as Assistant to the Poetry Director.
2016 Writers Workshops Staff
Tom Barbash is the author of four books as well as reviews, essays, and articles for publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, the Believer, Narrative Magazine, ZYZZYVA, and The New York Times. His short story collection Stay Up With Me was nominated for the Folio Prize and picked as a Best Book of the Year by the Independent of London, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. His novel The Last Good Chance was awarded The California Book Award and was a Publishers Weekly and Anniston Star Best Book of the Year. His nonfiction book On Top of the World, about the fate of the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11, was a New York Times Bestseller. A well-regarded speaker, panelist, and interviewer, Barbash teaches the novel, short fiction, and nonfiction at California College of the Arts. His most recent book, the novel The Dakota Winters, was a National Bestseller, and named as an Editors Choice by The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone and People.
Photo Credit: Sven Wiederholt
Craig Bolotin is a screenwriter and film director. He has written and rewritten numerous screenplays for such directors as Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Apted. His feature film credits include That Night, Light It Up and Black Rain. He has adapted the work of several novelists including Alice McDermott, John Updike and Hilary Mantel, and has taught at the American Film Institute and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
[Adaptation]
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” Fiction Writers by The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles. [F] www.sarahshunlienbynum.com
Ron Carlson’s newest novel is Return to Oakpine. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including the novel The Signal from Viking. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies; they have been performed on National Public Radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing, is taught widely. He is the author of a book of poems, Room Service. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review, the Aspen Literary Award; his novel Five Skies was selected “One Book Rhode Island” in 2009. He taught at Arizona State University for twenty years and is now Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. [F]
Photo Credit: Tracy E. Hall
Mark Childress is the author of seven novels, three books for children, several screenplays, and many articles, reviews and essays. His books include A World Made of Fire, V for Victor, Tender, Crazy in Alabama, Gone for Good, One Mississippi, and Georgia Bottoms. He has participated in the Community of Writers since 1980. [F] markchildress.com
Sands Hall is the author of the memoir Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint). Blackstone Audio produced the audio book, read by the author. Other books include the novel, Catching Heaven (Ballantine), a Random House Reader’s Circle selection and Willa Award Finalist (Woman Writing the West); and a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. Her stories and essays have appeared in such journals as Alta, New England Review, Iowa Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Professor Emeritus at Franklin & Marshall College, she lives in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. www.sandshall.com [Fiction/Memoir]
Photo Credit: Tracy Hall
Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, ZYZZYVA, The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Iowa Review and Huizache, among others. Her most recent work is Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California, a fictionalized account of the life of African American historian and scholar Delilah Beasley. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. [F] www.danajohnsonauthor.com
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Louis B. Jones is the author of five novels, three on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books. A Fellow of the NEA and the MacDowell Colony, he has published stories and essays in ZYZZYVA, Santa Monica Review, and The Threepenny Review. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis and Wichita State University; and has for many years helped run the Community of Writers. [Admin/Fiction]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Edie Meidav is the author of Kingdom of the Young, a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda; as well as the novels Lola, California, Crawl Space, and The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon. She also coedited Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance. Her work has been recognized with the Bard Fiction Prize, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel, and year-end editors’ picks, as well as support from the Fulbright Program, the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and more. She is a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions and teaches in the UMass Amherst MFA program, where she founded and advises the Radius MFA project. She has served as a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the Juniper Prize, Howard, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and elsewhere. https://www.ediemeidav.com/
Photo Credit: Joanna Morrisey
Joanne Meschery has published short stories, essays, and the novels, In A High Place, A Gentleman’s Guide to the Frontier, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and Home and Away. She is also the author of a book of nonfiction, Truckee. Selwa Press has published two of her novels as ebooks. Her fiction is featured in the 40th Anniversary Anthology of Cutbank Magazine, 2013. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
Victoria Patterson’s latest story collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow, was published in 2018. The critic Michael Schaub wrote: “There’s not a story in the book that’s less than great; it’s a stunningly beautiful collection by a writer working at the top of her game.” Her novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture,” was published in 2015. She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She currently teaches at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program. [F]
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the NBCC and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. Kirstin has received Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships, a Rome Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Stegner Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches at Princeton. [Fiction/Memoir]
Photo Credit: Holly Andres (c)2020
Jason Roberts is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book is Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, published this year by Random House. His previous book, A Sense of the World: How Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler, was a national bestseller and a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award. [NF]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Natalie Serber is the author of Community Chest, a novella-length memoir, and the story collection, Shout Her Lovely Name, a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, a summer reading selection from O, the Oprah Magazine, and an Oregonian Top 10 Book of the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, and Hunger Mountain. Essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; The Huffington Post; The San Francisco Chronicle; The Oregonian; The Rumpus; Salon; and Fourth Genre. She lives in Portland, Oregon. [F] www.natalieserber.com
Photo Credit: Sophie Serber
Julia Flynn Siler is an award-winning author and journalist. A former London-based staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, her writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her books are The White Devil’s Daughters (Knopf), The House of Mondavi (Gotham/Penguin), and Lost Kingdom (Grove/Atlantic). She serves on the Board of Directors and is also the co-director of the Community of Writers’ Narrative Nonfiction Program. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a competitive rower and mountain biker. She will be a visiting scholar at Oxford University in 2025. www.juliaflynnsiler.com [Nonfiction]
Photo credit: Stephanie Mohan
Dava Sobel, joining us as a nonfiction teaching staff member, 
a former New York Times science reporter, is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Longitude, which was the subject of a PBS science program “NOVA,” and Granada Films created a dramatic version starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon for A&E. Her nonfiction book, Galileo’s Daughter, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won a 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Christopher Award, was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography and was the subject of a two-hour Emmy Award-winning “NOVA” documentary. She is also the author of the books The Planets and A More Perfect Heaven. Dava is a long-time science contributor to Harvard Magazine, Audubon, Discover, Life, Omni, and The New Yorker. Bloomsbury has just released a stand-alone edition of her Copernicus play, And the Sun Stood Still, which was produced in 2014 by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company in Colorado.The editor of the collection Best American Science Writing 2004, published by Ecco Press, Ms. Sobel has served as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the Lewis Thomas Prize awarded by Rockefeller University to scientists who distinguish themselves as authors. Her new book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, will be published by Viking in December. www.davasobel.com
Photo Credit: Mia Bergs
Gregory Spatz’s most recent book publications are the novel Inukshuk and the collection of interconnected novellas and stories What Could Be Saved. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA and in many other publications. Among other honors and awards, he’s the recipient of a Washington State Book Award and an NEA Fellowship. A new novel, The Vivaldi Church, and collection of short fiction, Brake For Miracles, are both forthcoming in 2026. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University. [Fiction]
Photo Credit: Julia Graff
Elizabeth Tallent’s essays and stories have appeared in the O. Henry Prize Award, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She has published five story collections including, most recently, Mendocino Fire. Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism will appear in February 2020. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program.
Photo Credit: Dierdre Lamb
Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of six books, including the nonfiction Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” and the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His nonfiction Deep Down Dark was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. His books have been translated into 15 languages. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories. He earned his MFA from UC Irvine. As a journalist, he has been a foreign correspondent and has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. [F/NF] www.hectortobar.com
Photo: Patrice Normand, Opale Agency
Photo Credit: Jack Shoemaker
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Mary Volmer is the author of two novels: Crown of Dust (Soho Press, 2010) and Reliance, Illinois (Soho Press, May 2016). She earned an MFA at Saint Mary’s College (CA) and a master’s degree from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines and journals such as Fiction Writers Review, Farallon Review, Mutha Magazine and Women’s Basketball Magazine and featured on Stories on Stage (Sacramento). She teaches at Saint Mary’s College. www.maryvolmer.com
