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.
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 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 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. [F] www.danajohnsonauthor.com
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 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
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
Oscar Villalon is the editor of ZYZZYVA, a recipient of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. His work has been published in several publications, including The Believer, Stranger’s Guide, Alta, and Lit Hub, where he is a contributing editor. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their son.