Antonia Angress is the author of the novel Sirens & Muses (Ballantine/Random House, 2022), which was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and was named a Best Book of the Year by Glamour Magazine. She is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and a 2024 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grantee. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Costa Rica, she currently resides in Minneapolis with her family. She attended the Community in 2019.
2023 Published Alumni Readers
Stacy D. Flood’s (’98) work has appeared at ACT, Ghost Light Theatricals, Theatre Battery, and Theater Schmeater in Seattle, as well as in SOMA Magazine, Seattle Weekly, three Seattle Fringe productions, the Akropolis Performance Lab’s New Year/New Play salon, Playlist Seattle, the Adaptive Arts Theatre Company’s Night of New Works, Macha Theatre Works’ Distillery series, Mirror Stage’s ‘Expand Upon’ readings, The Hansberry Project’s REPRESENT festival, Infinity Box’s Centrifuge, FUSION Theatre Company’s ‘The Seven’ Short Works Festival, and in Starbucks’ The Way I See It campaign. He has served as an instructor at Seattle’s Hugo House and Portland’s Literary Arts as well as a lecturer at San Francisco State University — from which he holds an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Clark/Gross Novel Writing Award — and he has additionally been awarded both a Getty Fellowship to The Community of Writers and a Gregory Capasso Award in Fiction from the University at Buffalo. Furthermore, he has been a finalist in the Ashland New Play and Playwrights Foundation Bay Area festivals, and in addition, an artist-in-residence at DISQUIET in Lisbon and Millay Arts in New York. His play entitled The Optimist, or What Space Travel Means to Me will be featured as part of ACTLocal, and published by Lanternfish Press, The Salt Fields is his first novella.
Photo Credit: Bogdana Ferguson
Clare Frank (’18) served as the State of California’s first and only female Chief of Fire Protection. She began firefighting at age 17 and worked her way through the ranks, handling fire and rescue emergencies and major disasters in both urban and rural settings. Along the way, she earned a spot on an elite state command team, a bachelor’s in fire administration, a law degree, a master’s in creative writing, and several leadership awards. Now, she brings humor and candor to her stories about first responders, lawyers, and life. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN Opinion, Shondaland, FireRescue1, and others. Her first book, Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire is now available at a bookstore near you. She lives near Lake Tahoe with her husband and always a dog or two.
Photo credit: Cynthia Smalley
Ramona Reeves is the author of the debut collection It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press) which won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She has been awarded an AROHO fellowship, received a residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, won the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize and served as an associate fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Pembroke, New South, Superstition Review, Texas Highways and others.
Photo: Claire Mulkey
Monica West is the author of Revival Season, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, and short listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She received her B.A. from Duke University, her M.A. from New York University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She has received fellowships and funding from Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently serves as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at the University of San Francisco. [F] monicawestwrites.com