Mauro Javier Cardenas (’02, ’17) grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. He’s the author of American Abductions (Dalkey, 2024), Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). In 2016 he received a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 the Hay Festival included him in Bogota 39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, The Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, ZYZZYVA and BOMB. He’s the recipient of the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Award.
2017 Published Alumni Readers
Photo Credit: Emma McIntyre
Jade Chang (’10, ’17) is the author of the novel The Wangs vs. the World, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and recently longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. She has worked as an arts and culture journalist and editor for publications like the BBC, Metropolis, Glamour, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. She was recently an editor at Goodreads. Jade is the recipient of a Sundance Arts Journalist fellowship, the AIGA/Winterhouse Design Criticism Award. She also writes for film and TV and was recently a staff writer on The Baby-Sitter’s Club (Netflix).
Carole Firstman (’07, ’13) is the author of Origins of the Universe and What It All Means: A Memoir (Dzanc, 2016). Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Watershed Review, Lifestyle Magazine, The Valley Voice, and many other places. Honors include a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and two Notables in Best American Essays. She teaches writing at California State University, Fresno.
Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship, among others. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. Her novel, El Nido, is forthcoming. [Fiction/Nonfiction]
Kimball Taylor is the author of The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of Seven Thousand Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire. His journalism has appeared in Vice Media, ESPN The Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. A long-time contributor to Surfer magazine, Taylor has written two books about the sport. He attended the Community of Writers in 2011, and returned in 2017 as a Published Alum.