Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories, was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste imprint which promotes Latinx writers of the American West. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely including About Place Journal, Air/Light, Citric Acid, Huizache, Santa Monica Review, and in anthologies such as Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton) and most recently, Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond (Gunpowder Press). Devoted to promoting the writing of California, she has edited three anthologies including Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday) and Why to These Rocks: Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College, where she co-directs the PUENTE program.
2025 Authors
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 Best Seller. 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.
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Lou Berney is the USA Today best-selling author of seven novels, including, most recently, Double Barrel Bluff, Dark Ride, and November Road. He has been awarded the Edgar, Hammett, Barry, and Anthony awards, and is a three-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Oklahoma City University.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s 2021 second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a New York Times editor’s choice. Her novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, published by Macmillan, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Today, Alta, the Chicago Review of Books, and The Millions. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno. [Fiction]
Frances Dinkelspiel is the author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and winner of a Golden Poppy award, and Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, a New York Times bestseller that the Wall Street Journal and Food and Wine magazine named a best wine book of the year. She co-founded Cityside, the news organization behind Berkeleyside, The Oaklandside and Richmondside. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Beast, and People. [Nonfiction]
Photo Credit: Kelly Sullivan
Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review Online, among other magazines. His debut novel, The Devil Three Times, was published in May 2025 by Little, Brown and Company. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His writing seeks to honor his ancestors’ experiences. [Fiction]
Photo Credit: Lawrence Kim
Jamie Ford is the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His other bestselling novels include Songs of Willow Frost, and more recently, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. His work has been translated into 35 languages. Jamie is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer, Min Chung, who emigrated from Hoiping, China to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. [Fiction]
Samuel Freedman is an award-winning author, journalist, and educator. He is the author of 10 books, most recently Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. His books have been finalists for the National Book Award (Small Victories) and the Pulitzer Prize (The Inheritance) and have won the Sidney Hillman Prize (Into the Bright Sunshine), the National Jewish Book Award (Jew vs Jew), and the New York Public Library’s Helen M. Bernstein Award (Upon This Rock). As professor at Columbia Journalism School, Freedman developed a class in book-writing that has produced more than 115 authors, editors, and agents before his retirement. He will lead a special afternoon seminar, “The Book Proposal” at the Community of Writers summer workshops and as part of 2026 Writers’ Annex online will teach a short course “The Narrative Nonfiction Tradition.”
Samuel Freedman is profiled in this recent issue of New York Times: “One Class, 35 Years, 113 Deals, 95 Books.“
Photo Credit: Gabriela Bhaskar
Sands Hall is the author of the award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint); Blackstone Audio produced the audio book, read by the author. Her novel, Catching Heaven, is a Willa Award finalist. Her award-winning essays and stories have appeared in such journals as Alta Journal, New England Review, Iowa Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-directs the Nonfiction/Memoir program at the Community of Writers. sandshall.com [F/NF/M]
Photo Credit: Tracy Hall
Charlie Haas is an Oakland journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Esquire, New West, and many other magazines. His screenwriting credits include Over the Edge, Tex, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. His novel The Enthusiast (HarperPerennial) was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year. His newest novel, The Current Fantasy, was published in 2024 by Beck & Branch.
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]
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 of 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, and The Iowa Review, among others, and was anthologized in On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Recent work includes Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California, a fictional account of the life of historian and newspaper columnist Delilah Beasley. Collaborations include WE, with Los Angeles artist Susan Silton, whose etchings accompany Dana’s short story, “We See It Differently, You and I”, and UC Irvine’s dance theater production of The Story of Biddy Mason, produced by Annie Loui, artistic director of Counter-Balance Theater. Dana Johnson serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers. danajohnsonauthor.com [F]
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Louis B. Jones is the author of five novels, three on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books. A Fellow of the NEA and the MacDowell Colony, he has published stories and essays in ZYZZYVA, Santa Monica Review, and The Threepenny Review. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis and Wichita State University; and has for many years helped run the Community of Writers. [Admin/Fiction]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Maceo Montoya is an author, visual artist, and educator who has published books in a variety of genres, including four works of fiction: The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories, and Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces. Montoya has also published two works of nonfiction: Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays, and Chicano Movement for Beginners, which he both wrote and illustrated. Montoya is a professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses on Chicanx culture, literature, and creative writing. He is the editor of the literary magazine Huizache and lives in Woodland, CA. [Fiction/Nonfiction]
Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR Best Books of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His forthcoming novel Our Beautiful Boys will be published in 2025 by Ballantine/Random House in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the LA Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, and Sports Illustrated. He is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers. [Fiction]
Robin Romm is the author of several books, the short story collections The Mother Garden and Radical Empathy, the memoir The Mercy Papers, and the editor of the anthology Double Bind: Women on Ambition. She’s been awarded numerous fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, and won a 2024 O’Henry Prize. Her work has appeared in many places, such as The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, O Magazine, and Wired. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her daughters and spouse, Don Waters. [Fiction/Memoir]
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Knopf) and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a nonfiction finalist for the California Book Award. Her other books include The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty (Gotham Books, Penguin Random House), a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting, and Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (Grove/Atlantic). She co-directs the Nonfiction/Memoir program at the Community of Writers, and a contributor to National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a juror for the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards, and directs a 2026 literary series at Oxford University. She has spoken at TEDX, Google, and Harvard University, and was named a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She is currently at work on a book of narrative nonfiction that explores the world of polar exploration. juliaflynnsiler.com [NF]
Photo credit: Stephanie Mohan
Gregory Spatz’s most recent book publications are the novel Inukshuk and the collection of interconnected novellas and stories What Could Be Saved. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA and in many other publications. Among other honors and awards, he’s the recipient of a Washington State Book Award and an NEA Fellowship. A new novel, The Vivaldi Church, and collection of short fiction, Brake For Miracles, are both forthcoming in 2026, as well as a brief memoir, Whale Vision. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University. gregoryspatz.com [F]
Photo credit: Julia Graff
Amy Waldman is the author of the novels A Door in the Earth (Little, Brown 2019), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and The Submission (FSG 2011), which was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. Waldman has received fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was previously a reporter for The New York Times, where, as a bureau chief for South Asia, she covered Afghanistan. She is working on a book of creative non-fiction about our emotional history with snow. [Fiction/Nonfiction]