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.
2018 Writers Workshops Staff
Photo Credit: Roy Zipstein
Charmaine Craig studied literature at Harvard College, received her MFA from the University of California at Irvine, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. Her first novel, The Good Men (Riverhead), was a national bestseller translated into six languages. Her second novel, Miss Burma (Grove), recently long listed for the National Book Award, is based on the lives of her mother and grandparents, all born in Burma. Formerly an actor in film and television, she grew up in Los Angeles, where she now resides. http://www.charmainecraig.com/
Photo credit: Roy Zipstein
Leslie Daniels’ first novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House, has been published in translation in four languages. The novel, now under option for film, fights the good fight of being both literary and funny. Daniels’ stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications. Her background in publishing includes over a decade as a literary agent in New York, as well as serving as the fiction editor for Green Mountains Review. Leslie Daniels lives in Ithaca, New York. www.lesliedaniels.com
Karen Joy Fowler is a novelist and writer of short fiction. Her work ranges from literary to science fiction, from contemporary to historical. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves won the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award, the California Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2014. Her novel Booth was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2022. She is currently sheltering at home in the beautiful city of Santa Cruz, California. www.karenjoyfowler.com
Photo credit: Nathan Quintanilla
Glen David Gold is the author of the best selling novels Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside and the memoir I Will Be Complete. He has written short stories, essays and journalism for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, McSweeney’s, Wired and Zyzzyva, and comic books for DC, Marvel and Dark Horse. His dramatic work includes stuff you’ve never heard of nor seen anywhere, and easily-available episodes of the podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and The Thrilling Adventure Hour.
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. 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. [F/M] www.sandshall.com
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 fictional account of 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. www.danajohnsonauthor.com/
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Louis B. Jones is the author of the novels Ordinary Money (Viking); Particles and Luck and California’s Over (Pantheon); Radiance, and Innocence (Counterpoint). His short fiction and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Threepenny Review, Open City, The Sun, Santa Monica Review, the Pushcart Prize, and The Best of Pushcart anthology. He co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers. [F] www.louisbjones.com
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Photo credit: Ralph Palumbo
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/
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Peter Orner is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and, Love and Shame and Love and three story collections, Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. His collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Still No Word from You, a memoir in essays, was published in October, 2022. A three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Orner’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. He has been awarded the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Orner is the director of creative writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Vermont, where he’s a volunteer on the fire department. [F/NF] peterorner.com
Photo: Pawel Kruk
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. In September she will join the faculty of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. [F] kirstinvaldezquade.com
Photo Credit: Holly Andres (c)2020
Jason Roberts is the author of the nonfiction works A Sense of the World and the forthcoming Every Living Thing. He is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and the Guardian First Book awards, and winner of the Van Zorn Prize. He is also the editor of four titles in the bestselling 642 Books series, each of them collections of creative materials for writers. http://jasonroberts.net/
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Elizabeth Rosner (’82, ’83, ’87, ’99) is a novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her book of nonfiction, published in September 2017, is entitled SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. It was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice. Interviews with Ms. Rosner have been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and in The New York Times. Her most recent novel, ELECTRIC CITY, was named one of the best books of 2014 by National Public Radio. Her highly praised autobiographical poetry collection, GRAVITY, was published by Atelier26 Books in Fall 2014. THE SPEED OF LIGHT, her debut novel of 2001, was translated into nine languages, and won several literary prizes in both the US and Europe, including the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, the Prix France Bleu Gironde, and the Great Lakes Colleges Award in Fiction. It was short-listed for the prestigious Prix Femina in 2002, and picked as the “One City One Book” choice of Peoria, IL that same year. BLUE NUDE, her second novel, was named among the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.elizabethrosner.com/
Photo credit: Judy Dater
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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, 2019), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a nonfiction finalist for the California Book Award. Her other books are The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, 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. A graduate of Brown University (American Studies) and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Siler also earned an MBA at night from Northwestern University. A veteran journalist and National Endowment for the Humanities “Public Scholar” fellow, Siler was a foreign correspondent based in London and has been a guest commentator on PBS, the BBC, CNBC, and CNN. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She will be a fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute in 2024-2025. [NF] juliaflynnsiler.com
Photo credit: Stephanie Mohan
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.
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Andrew Winer is the author of the novels The Marriage Artist (Henry Holt) and The Color Midnight Made (Simon & Schuster). He also publishes philosophical and literary essays and conducts conversations with fellow authors, most recently with Colm Toibin and Geoff Dyer. He is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, author Charmaine Craig, and their daughters. [F] www.andrewwiner.com
