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.
2020 Short Story Staff in the Virtual Valley
Michael Jaime-Becerra is a writer from El Monte, California, a working-class suburb east of East Los Angeles. He is the author of This Time Tomorrow, a novel awarded an International Latino Book Award, and Every Night Is Ladies’ Night, a story collection that received the California Book Award for a First Work of Fiction. Recent essays of his have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, ZYZZYVA, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Photo Credit: EVJ
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
Krys Lee is the author of the story collection Drifting House and the novel How I Became a North Korean, and the translator of I Hear Your Voice and the story collection Diary of a Murderer by Young-ha Kim. She received 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, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. She currently teaches creative writing at Yonsei University, Underwood International College in Seoul, South Korea. kryslee.com [F/M]
Photo Credit: Matt Douma
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
Oscar Villalon is the Editor of ZYZZYVA, the award-winning California literary journal. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, The Approach, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. A former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, he has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction three times, including once as jury chair, and has served as a judge for the National Book Awards. He lives with his family in San Francisco, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers.