Lisa Alvarez

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.

Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones

Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel (’07, ’12) is the author of three novels and two story collections. Her new novel, The Last Animal, was published in spring of 2023. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, California and Colorado Book Awards and long-listed for the Story Prize, Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award and New York Times Notable Book selections. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction.

Her work has appeared in The New YorkerTin HouseThe New York Times, NPR’s Selected ShortsOne StoryElectric LiteraturePloughsharesThe Oxford American, and collected in The Best American Fantasy and online in The Paris Review. She has been a finalist for the Puschart Prize and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Photo Credit: Teo Grossman

Leland Cheuk

Leland Cheuk (’01, ’02, ’19) is the award-winning author of three books of fiction, including the novel No Good Very Bad Asian. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, NPR, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon. He’s been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Hawthornden Castle, Djerassi, and elsewhere. He founded and runs the press 7.13 Books and lives in Los Angeles.

Photo Credit: Jessi Tran

Tyler Dilts

Tyler Dilts (’00) is the author of five novels, including the the Edgar Award-nominated Come Twilight and the #1 Amazon Bestseller, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah. He earned his MFA in Fiction from California State University, Long Beach where he now teaches fiction writing and narrative theory. He’s also served as the Visiting Writer at John Cabot University in Rome and taught as visiting faculty at the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program. His most recent novel, Mercy Dogs, is currently being developed as a TV series by Bad Wolf Productions.

Frances Dinkelspiel

Frances Dinkelspiel (’03, ’04) is an award-winning journalist and author who co-founded Cityside, the nonprofit news organization behind Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside. She’s contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Beast, People, and AARP. She got her start in the news business as a staff writer at the Syracuse Newspapers and then at the San Jose Mercury News. Frances is the author of two books, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, one of the Chronicle’s best books of the year, and won a Golden Poppy award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Association. Her second book, Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and was named a best wine book of the year by the Wall Street Journal and Food and Wine magazine.

Photo Credit: Nathan Phillips

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza’s (’04, ’05) debut novel, Still Water Saints, was published to wide critical acclaim. His second novel, The Five Acts of Diego León, was the winner of a 2014 American Book Award. He is the author of the nonfiction book Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime and has written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, VQR, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. His short story “Detainment” was selected for inclusion in the 2022 Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories.  His latest novel is The Sons of El Rey (Simon and Schuster, June 2024). Alex lives in Los Angeles and is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair and Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Janet Fitch

Janet Fitch is the bestselling author of White Oleander, an Oprah Book Club selection translated into 28 languages and made into a feature film; Paint it Black, also widely translated and adapted for the screen. Her most recent books are two epics of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral. Her short stories appear in Los Angeles Noir and Palm Springs Noir, and a film of her noir story “The Method” has just wrapped. Long time faculty at the Community of Writers, Fitch hosts her popular Writing Wednesdays writing series on Facebook and Youtube. [F]  www.janetfitchwrites.com

Photo credit: Cat Gwynn

Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning; The Flowers; Gritos; Woodcuts of Women; The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña; and The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in many magazines, including Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Texas Monthly, and are reprinted widely. A union high-rise carpenter for nearly two decades, Gilb is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is the founding editor of Huizache magazine. He makes his home in Austin.

Photo Credit: Jean Luc Bertini

 

Sands Hall

Sands Hall is the author most recently of the award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint Press). Blackstone Audio produced the audio book, read by the author. Her novel, Catching Heaven (Ballantine), is a Willa Award finalist. Her prize-winning essays and stories have appeared in such journals as Alta Journal, New England Review, Iowa Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.  Sands co-directs the Nonfiction/Memoir Program at the Community of Writers. [F/NF] sandshall.com

Photo Credit: Tracy Hall

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir, The Lost Night. Her stories and essays have appeared in StoryQuarterly, ZYZZYVA, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. She served as Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow and Interim Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College and teaches nonfiction and novel writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. For more than 20 years she has written dance criticism for the San Francisco Chronicle. [F/NF] rachelhoward.com

Photo Credit: Emmet Cullen

Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of A River of Stars, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and Forbidden City. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area with her family and has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, University of San Francisco and elsewhere. [F/NF] www.vanessahua.com

Photo Credit: Andria Lo

Louis B. 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. [F]

Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones 

Krys Lee

Krys Lee is the author of the story collection Drifting House and the novel How I Became a North Korean, and the translator of two books by Young-ha Kim. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, a Granta New Voices pick, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. She teaches creative writing at Yonsei University, Underwood International College. www.kryslee.com

Photo Credit: Matt Douma

Tom Lutz

Tom Lutz is the American Book Award-winning author of eleven books and the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books are Born Slippy (2020), a novel; Aimlessness (2021), a lyrical-philosophical essay on blundering about as method; and The Kindness of Strangers (2021), the third book in his travel trilogy, He is finishing up a collection of photographic portraits with micro-essays, and working on a new novel and a book about violence along the aridity line.
Photo Credit: David Walter Banks

Victoria Patterson

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]

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On The Rooftop, was a September 2022 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick. Her second novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National. Book Award. She lives in Oakland with her family. [F] margaretwilkersonsexton.com

Photo Credit: Smeeta Mahanti

Julia Flynn Siler

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. She serves as the co-director of the nonfiction program at the Community of Writers.    juliaflynnsiler.com

Photo credit: Stephanie Mohan

Gregory Spatz

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. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University. [F]  gregoryspatz.com

Photo Credit: Julia Graff

Héctor Tobar

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

Jane Vandenburgh

Jane Vandenburgh is a novelist and writer of memoir/personal nonfiction whose shorter work has appeared in The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker.
She is the author of Architecture of the Novel, on structuring the longer narrative and teaches a yearlong workshop in the book-length work through the Djerassi Resident Arts Program in Woodside, California. Her third novel, January Man, will be published in 2020.

www.janevandenburgh.com

Photo Credit: Jack Shoemaker