Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories, was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste imprint which promotes Latinx writers of the American West. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely including About Place Journal, Air/Light, Citric Acid, Huizache, Santa Monica Review, and in anthologies such as Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton) and most recently, Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond (Gunpowder Press). Devoted to promoting the writing of California, she has edited three anthologies including Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday) and Why to These Rocks: Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College, where she co-directs the PUENTE program.
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 Best Seller. 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: Brett Hall Jones
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 award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint); Blackstone Audio produced the audio book, read by the author. Her novel, Catching Heaven, is a Willa Award finalist. Her award-winning essays and stories have appeared in such journals as Alta Journal, New England Review, Iowa Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-directs the Nonfiction/Memoir program at the Community of Writers. sandshall.com [F/NF/M]
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 of 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, and The Iowa Review, among others, and was anthologized in On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Recent work includes Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California, a fictional account of the life of historian and newspaper columnist Delilah Beasley. Collaborations include WE, with Los Angeles artist Susan Silton, whose etchings accompany Dana’s short story, “We See It Differently, You and I”, and UC Irvine’s dance theater production of The Story of Biddy Mason, produced by Annie Loui, artistic director of Counter-Balance Theater. Dana Johnson serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers. danajohnsonauthor.com [F]
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 nonfiction and fiction. His most recent book, Every Living Thing, was honored with the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing award. His previous book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the international Guardian First Book Award. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers, and lives in Oakland and Montreal. [F/NF]
Photo Credit: Christopher Michel
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 a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Knopf) and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a nonfiction finalist for the California Book Award. Her other books include The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty (Gotham Books, Penguin Random House), a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting, and Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (Grove/Atlantic). She co-directs the Nonfiction/Memoir program at the Community of Writers, and a contributor to National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a juror for the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards, and directs a 2026 literary series at Oxford University. She has spoken at TEDX, Google, and Harvard University, and was named a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She is currently at work on a book of narrative nonfiction that explores the world of polar exploration. juliaflynnsiler.com [NF]
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, as well as a brief memoir, Whale Vision. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University. gregoryspatz.com [F]
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 author of seven books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award Gold Medal. Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Best American Short Stories. He earned his MFA from the UC Irvine, where he is currently a professor. As a journalist, has been an op-ed writer for the New York Times and a contributor to The New Yorker. His most recent book, Our Migrant Souls, won the Kirkus Prize. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship. hectortobar.com [F/NF/M]
Photo: Patrice Normand, Opale Agency
Photo Credit: Jack Shoemaker
Photo Credit: Kory Hayden
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
