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 lives in Santa Cruz, California. [F] www.karenjoyfowler.com
2021 Festival Day – Readers
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
Peter Orner is the author of eight books, most recently the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, named one of the best books of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, as well as the essay collections, Still No Word from You, a finalist for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay, and Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His story collection Maggie Brown and Others was a New York Times Notable Book. Other books include Love and Shame and Love (Winner of the California Book Award) Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), and Esther Stories. A recipient of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orner is also the editor of three books of oral history for the Voice of Witness series, and co-editor with Laura Lampton Scott of a new oral history series from McSweeney’s called “Dispatches.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Paris Review and has been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. With Yvette Benavides, he’s the co-host of the Lonely Voice Podcast on Texas Public Radio. Orner recently led short courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Melville’s Moby-Dick for the Community of Writers/Writers’ Annex. He teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont. [F/NF]
Photo: Brett Hall Jones
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
Martin J. Smith is the author of five crime novels and five nonfiction books including Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads, a finalist for a 2022 Colorado Book Award. The veteran journalist and magazine editor has won more than fifty newspaper and magazine writing awards, and his novels have been short-listed for three of the publishing industry’s most prestigious honors, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. He is a former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Orange Coast Magazine. [F/NF] martinjsmith.com
Andrew Tonkovich is the longtime editor of the West Coast literary arts journal the Santa Monica Review and founding editor of Citric Acid, an online Orange County, California quarterly. He hosts a weekly books show, Bibliocracy Radio, on Pacifica’s KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California. He co-edited the landmark anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide with Lisa Alvarez and is the author of two collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. His short stories, book reviews, essays, and journalism have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Faultline, Solstice, Journal of the Plague Years, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For many years he was a regular contributor to the OC Weekly. [F]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Gail Tsukiyama is the author of nine novels, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai’s Garden, The Color of Air, and her latest novel, The Brightest Star. She has been the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center of the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. One of fifty authors chosen by the Library of Congress to participate in the first National Book Festival in Washington D.C., she has taught at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College. [F] gailtsukiyama.com