Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship, among others. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. Her novel, El Nido, is forthcoming. [Fiction/Nonfiction]
2023 – tuesday
Edan Lepucki is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels California, Woman No. 17, and Time’s Mouth. She is also the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. Her nonfiction has been published in Esquire Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Cut, among other publications, and her short story “People in Hell Want Ice Water” is available as an Audible Original. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Photo credit: Ralph Palumbo
Keenan Norris is a novelist, essayist and scholar. His latest novel is The Confession of Copeland Cane, the winner of the 2022 Northern California Book Award. His essays have garnered the 2021-22 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award in Music, Theater and Performing Arts and the 2021 Folio: Eddie Award. His other books include the non-fiction work Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings and his debut novel Brother and the Dancer, which received the James D. Houston Award in 2012. Keenan has served as Lannan Visiting Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts (2023) and Rea Visiting Writer at the University of Virginia (2021). Since 2022, he’s served as coordinator of the Steinbeck Fellows Program at San Jose State University. In 2025, he became Areas Editor (nonfiction) for Callaloo Literary Journal. His feature pieces and articles have appeared in numerous forums, including The Nation, Alta Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, TED-ED, and ZYZZYVA, while his short fiction has been published in several anthologies of California literature. He is an Associate Professor at San Jose State University. keenannorris.com [F/NF/M]
Photo: Akubundu Amazu-Lott
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in the Mojave Desert, in Tecopa, California, and Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno and the Ohio State University, Claire is the author of three books: two novels (Gold, Fame, Citrus, and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness), and the short story collection Battleborn. She has been awarded the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, theNewYorker.com, The Believer, on Granta‘s list of “Best Young American Novelists,” and elsewhere. She is a professor at UC Irvine, lives in Twentynine Palms, and can often be found at Camp Yellow Pine in the South Pahrump Valley, where she engages in direct action against for-profit industrial solar on public wilderness and for free, distributed community solar in the built environment alongside local conservation groups Basin and Range Watch and Mojave Green. [F/NF]