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 seven books, the memoirs/ essay collections, Still No Word from You, a finalist for the PEN: Diamonstein/Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the story collection, Maggie Brown and Others, a New York Times Notable Book, and the novel, Love and Shame and Love, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize), and Esther Stories, (finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award). Peter is also the editor of three books of oral history for the McSweeney’s/ Voice of Witness series. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and been awarded four Pushcart Prizes as well as the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A new novel, the Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, will be published by Little, Brown in 2025. Peter has taught at San Francisco State University, the University of Iowa, Northwestern, and currently is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. Orner recently led a major CW short course on James Joyce’s Ulysses. [Fiction]
Photo: Pawel Kruk
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 Santa Monica Review and founding editor of Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination. His writing has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orange County Register, ZYZZYVA, Ecotone, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Los Angeles Times, Faultline, and Juked. He was for many years a contributing writer to the OC Weekly on books and politics. He is the author of two fiction collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. With Lisa Alvarez, he co-edited the landmark anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide. He taught at UC Irvine for twenty-five years, serving as president and grievance steward of the union representing adjunct faculty. Tonkovich hosts a weekly books show and podcast, Bibliocracy Radio, which airs on Pacifica Radio KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California, and edits the Community of Writers’ OGQ. [Fiction]
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