Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection of short fiction, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories is forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals including About Place Journal, Air/Light, Anacapa Review, Huizache, So It Goes, and in anthologies including most recently, Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press) and Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters (Stanford University Press) edited by David Kipen. She has edited three anthologies including Why to These Rocks: 50 years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College where she co-directs the Puente Program. She co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers and serves as Assistant to the Poetry Director.
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 Bestseller. 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: Sven Wiederholt
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. 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. His first novel, The Devil Three Times, is forthcoming from Little Brown May 2025. [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 a professor at Columbia Journalism School, Freedman developed a class in book-writing that has produced more than 110 authors, editors, and agents. He will lead a special afternoon seminar on the Book Proposal at the Community of Writers.
Sands Hall is the author of the memoir Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint). Blackstone Audio produced the audio book, read by the author. Other books include the novel, Catching Heaven (Ballantine), a Random House Reader’s Circle selection and Willa Award Finalist (Woman Writing the West); and a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. Her stories and essays have appeared in such journals as Alta, New England Review, Iowa Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Professor Emeritus at Franklin & Marshall College, she lives in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. www.sandshall.com [Fiction/Memoir]
Photo Credit: Tracy Hall
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]
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]
Wayétu Moore is the author of the novel She Would Be King (2018), and a memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women ( 2020) both published by Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction and the 2022 William Saroyan Prize for Nonfiction. She Would Be King was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist & Entertainment Weekly. The novel was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book, a #1 Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. The Dragons, The Giant, The Women was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence in nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moore is a graduate of Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. [Fiction/Memoir]
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
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]
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
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 an award-winning author and journalist. A former London-based staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, her writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her books are The White Devil’s Daughters (Knopf), The House of Mondavi (Gotham/Penguin), and Lost Kingdom (Grove/Atlantic). She serves on the Board of Directors and is also the co-director of the Community of Writers’ Narrative Nonfiction Program. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a competitive rower and mountain biker. She will be a visiting scholar at Oxford University in 2025. www.juliaflynnsiler.com [Nonfiction]
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. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University. [Fiction]
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]