Robin Page was raised in Cincinnati and has degrees from UCLA and UC Irvine’s MFA program. She lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles, and has powerfully mined her experience as a displaced Midwesterner, a woman of color, and a mother in her newest book Small Silent Things. She attended the Community of Writers in 2002.
2020 Published Alumni Reading Series
Shobha Rao is the author of the short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She attended the Community of Writers in 2002. She lives in San Francisco. https://shobharaowrites.com/
Marci Vogel is the author of Death and Other Holidays, winner of the Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize for the Novella; and At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, winner of the Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Her poetry, prose, translations, and cross-genre inventions appear in Jacket2, VIDA, Seneca Review, Plume, and other publications. A first-generation college student, Vogel earned a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California, where she currently serves as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. She attended the Community of Writers in 2005 and 2017 as the recipient of a Hillary Gravendyk Memorial Scholarship. www.marcivogel.com
Photo Credit: Peter Figen
Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, and many other publications. Her unusual family story has been featured on Snap Judgement and NPR’s Fresh Air. She is grateful to have received the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship and other support from the Community of Writers, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. https://aliavolz.com/
Photo Credit: Dennis Hearne
Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Gulf Coast, Tin House online, New Delta Review, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), and elsewhere. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and awarded scholarships at Writing x Writers, the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, the Community of Writers, and elsewhere. She is a native of Boston and lives in Chicago, where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University. https://www.katewisel.com/