Writers Workshops Notable Alumni

Christina Adams (’00) is an American award-winning writer, journalist, author and speaker. She and her work have been featured by National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, LA Times Magazine, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Dubai One, GOOD, Open Democracy, OZY, Autism File, Global Advances in Health and Medicine, WebMD and more. Her book A Real Boy (Berkley/Penguin) reveals the world of autism and her son’s early intervention. Her series “Autism and Beyond” airs on Autism Live at www.autism-live.com. An expert on autism and camel milk, she advises families and scientists from many countries and enjoys connecting with people from all cultures.

Andrea Alban (’04) is a poet and novelist, and author of eight inspirational parenting and children’s picture books. Her first novel, Anya’s War, which she brought to Squaw Valley in 2004, published in 2011 (Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan) and was shortlisted for China’s Panda Award.and was a 2012 ALA honor book. The paperback edition published in March 2016. Her picture book, The Happiness Tree, was adapted for stage by the University of Utah and is traveling with the OUT ON A LIMB exhibit through children’s discovery museums in the US and Canada. Andrea speaks at schools and conferences, is the founder of the Writer’s Tribe™, a feedback forum for children’s writers, and mentors writers in the path to publishing and craft of fiction.

Kevin Allardice (’06, ’12) is the author of the novel Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, published by Counterpoint Press in 2013, and Family Genus Species (Outpost, May, 2017), The Ghosts of Bohemian Grove (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), As the Ceiling Flew Away (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), and Weft: A Novel (Madrona Books). He earned his MFA at The University of Virginia. His fiction has appeared in The Santa Monica Review, The Florida Review, The North American Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere; it has also won the Donald Barthelme Prize, twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.

Andrew Foster Altschul (’97) is the author of the novels Lady Lazarus and Deus Ex Machina. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, and anthologies including Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he currently teaches at Colorado State University. 

David Bajo (’87, ’88) is the author of four novels: The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri (2008, Viking/Penguin), Panopticon (2010, Unbridled Books), Mercy 6 (2014, Unbridled Books), and The Ensenada Public Library (2018, Brighthorse Books). He is a professor of creative writing at The University of South Carolina where he directs the MFA program.

Michael Barsa (’04) grew up in a German-speaking household in New Jersey. He’s worked as an award-winning grant writer, an English teacher, and an environmental lawyer. He now teaches environmental and natural resources law. His scholarly articles have appeared in several major law reviews, and his writing on environmental policy has appeared in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times. His short fiction has appeared in Sequoia. The Garden of Blue Roses is his first novel.

Judy Batalion (’11) ’s first book, White Walls: A Memoir of Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between, was published by NAL/Penguin in January, 2016. A former columnist for the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, Judy has written essays, reviews and criticism for Vogue, the Washington Post, Salon, Cosmo, the Forward, Redbook, and many other publications. Her newest book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2021), is a New York Times bestseller and won a National Jewish Book Award and a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. It was adapted into an award-winning children’s book, will be translated into 23 languages, and was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, for whom Judy is co-writing the screenplay.

J. L. Bautista has worked as a journalist, researcher, copyeditor, and documentary filmmaker. She lives in Berkeley, California, and travels widely. Her first published book, Fiestas, a collection of short stories, won the 2005 George Garrett Award in Fiction. Her novel The Road, and Nothing More was published in 2012. She has also published short stories, essays, film criticism, and poetry and is presently working on a novel about unlikely heroes. www.jacquelinebautista.com

Elise Blackwell (’88, ’90) is the author of five novels: Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Grub, An Unfinished Score, and The Lower Quarter. Her work has been translated into several languages, and her books have been named to numerous best-of-the-year lists, adapted for the stage, and served as the inspiration for a Decemberists’ song. Originally from southern Louisiana, Elise teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina and hosts the literary series The Open Book. In addition to working on her sixth novel, Elise is writing a hundred flash fictions triggered by Pablo Neruda’s love sonnets and set along the Gulf Coast. Unlike Neruda’s poems, which are written in the voice of one lover to one beloved, these pieces share no characters and explore a wide range of romantic experience.

Paulette Boudreaux (’06) is the author of the novel Mulberry, which was published in 2015 by Carolina Wren Press and is the winner of the inaugural Lee Smith Novel Prize. Paulette has published short fiction in Voices, Acorn Whistle, In the Margins, Room of One’s Own, and Equinox: Writing for a New Culture. She has a B.A. in journalism from Northeastern University and a M.F.A. from Mills College. She teaches writing at West Valley College in Silicon Valley.

James Brown (’96, ’97, ’98, ’99, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05) is the author of several memoirs, including Apology to the Young Addict, The Los Angeles Diaries, and This River. He and Patrick O’Neil co-authored Writing Your Way to Recovery: How Stories Can Save Our Lives, a creative writing handbook combining intimate personal stories of hope and renewal with the art of memoir writing. Brown has also written several novels and is the recipient of the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Liz Brown (’06) is the author of Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire, (Penguin Books, 2021). She earned her MFA at the New School in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Design Observer, Elle Decor, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, and other publications. She’s the recipient of a Wallis Annenberg Research Grant from USC and a Brown Foundation fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France.

Carl Brush (’02, ’04) is the author of the historical thriller, The Maxwell Vendetta, its sequel, The Second Vendetta, and its trilogy Bonita. A fourth in the series is on its way. Carl lives with his wife in Oakland, California, where he enjoys the blessings of nearby children and grandchildren. Journals in which his work has appeared include The Summerset Review, Right Hand Pointing, Blazevox, Storyglossia, Feathertale, and The Kiss Machine.

Dani Burlison (’12) is the author of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body (PM Press, 2019), a short story collection, Some Places Worth Leaving (Tolsun Books, 2020), Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos: True Stories, a collection of essays which appears in the Lady Parts zine series (available at Pioneers Press). She is the co-editor, with Margaret Elysia Garcia, of Red Flag Warning, an anthology about fires in Northern California. Dani has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, a book reviewer for Los Angeles Review and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, The Rumpus, Made Local Magazine and Emerald Report. Her journalism, fiction and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine, WIRED, Vice, Utne, Earth Island Journal, Ploughshares, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad, Spirituality & Health Magazine, North Bay Bohemian, The Press Democrat, Shareable, Common Good, Sustainable America, Ravishly, Tahoma Literary Review, Vestal Review, Bike Monkey Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, sparkle + blink and more.

Kenneth Calhoun (’00, ’01) has had stories published in The Paris Review, Tin House, New Stories from The South and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Collection, among others. His novel, Black Moon, was published in 2014 by Hogarth. It was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and long-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Debut Novel Prize. Kenneth is currently working on his second, third and seventh novel.

Jamie Cat Callan (’90) is the author of eight books, including Parisian Charm School, Ooh La La! French Secrets to Feeling Beautiful Every Day, Bonjour, Happiness!, The Writers Toolbox, Just Too Cool, NAL, The Young and the Soapy, Over the Hill at Fourteen, and French Women Don’t Sleep Alone, which has been translated into fourteen languages. She is also the creator of The Writers Toolbox (Chronicle Books). Her short fiction and personal essays have been published in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, Story, and The Missouri Review. Jamie has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Arts Council. Most recently, Jamie received a VCCA fellowship to spend a month writing in Auvillar, France.

Aneesha Capur’s (’05) first novel, Stealing Karma (HarperCollins India, 2011) was listed in the Top 5 Fiction Picks in The Hindu, picked as Essential Reading in the Sunday Guardian and featured on CNN-IBN. Stealing Karma was on WHSmith’s Bestsellers List in Fiction in India in 2011 and was featured at the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing and the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali. Excerpts have been recognized in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, Wild River Review, two Glimmer Train Press competitions and the Writer’s Digest Literary Short Story award.

Leonard Chang (’94) is the author of eight novels, including his first, The Fruit ‘N Food (1996), winner of the Black Heron Press Award, Dispatches from the Cold (1998), which won the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature, the Choice trilogy, Crossings, Triplines, and The Lockpicker. He is also a writer/co-executive producer for the new FX TV drama, Snowfall, about the introduction of crack cocaine to Los Angeles. He studied philosophy at Harvard, creative writing at UC-Irvine’s graduate writing program, and lives in south L.A. 

Julie Chibbaro (’99, ’01) Julie Chibbaro is the award-winning author of three novels: Into the Dangerous World  (Viking, 2015), Deadly (Simon & Schuster 2011, Scholastic 2012), and Redemption (Simon & Schuster 2004). Into the Dangerous World was a Junior Library Guild Selection, was named a 2016 Notable Social Studies Trade Book by the Children’s Book Council, and was  nominated for the North Carolina YA Book Award. Deadly won the 2011 National Jewish Book Award, and was Top 10 on the American Library Association’s Amelia Bloomer Project list. It was named a Bank Street Best Book, and an Outstanding Science Trade Book by the National Science Teachers Association and is now part of many schools’ curriculum. Redemption was nominated for the Illinois HS Book Award, and won the American Book Award. Julie has written for The Prague Post, The Montreal Gazette, The Poughkeepsie Journal, Hudson Valley Magazine, NY States of Mind, Books in Canada, SundanceTV, Tuttle Publishing, and many other venues.

Amanda Churchill is a writer living in Texas. Her novel, The Turtle House, was inspired by the life of her beloved grandmother, a Japanese war bride. Her work has been featured in Hobart Pulp, Witness, River Styx, and other publications. She is a Writers’ League of Texas 2021 Fellow and has attended the Tin House Summer and Winter Conferences, the One Story Summer Workshop, and StoryBoard Chicago. She was a Fall 2020 mentee in AWP’s Writer to Writer program.

Terence Clarke (’72, ’73) is the author of seven books, including The King of Rumah Nadai, My Father In The Night, A Kiss for Señor Guevara, The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro, The Splendid City (English), La Espléndida Ciudad (Spanish), When Clara Was Twelve, and The Moment Before. Clarke blogs regularly about the arts on Huffington Post and GoodReads. He is a co-founder and the director of publishing for Astor & Lenox in San Francisco.

Mark Coggins (’96, ’01) earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University and has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and Hewlett Packard Company. While at Stanford, he studied literature and creative writing with Tobias Wolff, N. Scott Momaday and Ron Hansen and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” was later published in The New Black Mask, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others. Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) respectively, both in the crime fiction category. The Immortal Game was optioned for a film. Coggins has published short fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the anthology Masters of Technique, as well as nonfiction in View Camera and Distributed Object Computing magazines.

Jody Cohan-French (’94) is an award-winning writer, editor, and writing coach. Her latest book, The Write Way into College, is an accessible guide that shows students how to set themselves apart from the competition with compelling application essays. Her previous book, The World Was Our Stage: Spanning the Globe with ABC Sports, is a collaboration with 17-time Emmy Award-winning producer/director Doug Wilson. Doug’s master storytelling abilities are transferred to pages, where he recounts his incredible fifty-year journey with ABC Sports and its groundbreaking sports anthology program, Wide World of Sports. This book won four awards in both sports and history categories. Jody’s book, What If Your Prince Falls Off His Horse?–The Married Woman’s Primer on Financial Planning, also won several awards, including top honors in the Business Category at the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival. From 2005 through 2010, Jody coauthored the Procrastinator’s SOS Planner.

Myfanwy Collins (’04, ’05) lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, and Potomac Review. She has published one novel, Echolocation (Engine Books, 2012) and a collection of her short fiction entitled I Am Holding Your Hand (PANK Books, January 2013). Her young adult novel, The Book of Laney, was published by Lacewing Books in 2015.

Elena Conis (’07), a science writer and historian, is the author of Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, and elsewhere. Her Los Angeles Times column “Nutrition Lab” won the Institute of Food Technologists Media Award in 2011. Elena lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches in the history department at Emory University. Her second book, How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT was released in 2022.

Lindsey Crittenden (’98) is the author of two books, The View from Below: Stories (1999) and The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray (1997). Her articles, essays, and stories have appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, Spirituality & Health, Pisgah Review, Best American Spiritual Writing, The New York Times, Glimmer Train, and other publications. Lindsey was named an Honored Instructor (of writing) at UC Berkeley Extension in May 2013, where she still teaches. She also teaches at the Grotto.

Eileen Cronin‘s (’05, ’06, ’09) memoir, Mermaid (January 2014 with W.W. Norton) was selected for O Magazine’s “Memoirs Too Powerful to Put Down” and “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.” Translations in Chinese, Spanish, and Korean are forthcoming. Eileen was awarded the Washington Writing Prize in Short Fiction (2008). She had a notable essay mentioned in the 2011 Best American Essays. Her fiction and essays have appeared in several literary reviews and newspapers. She’s also been an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine.

Jasmin Darznik’s (’06, ’10) is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, including The Bohemians, a novel that imagines the friendship between photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese American assistant in 1920s San Francisco. A New York Times Book Review summer 2021 recommendation, The Bohemians is also one of Oprah Daily’s best books of historical fiction for 2021. Darznik’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” book and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Darznik is also the author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in eighteen countries and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. Her fourth book, a novel set in Old Hollywood, is forthcoming from Ballantine.

Mo Daviau (’10) is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave (St. Martin’s Press, February 2016). She is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where Every Anxious Wave won a Hopwood Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Offing, The Toast, and Nailed Magazine. Mo is a bookseller and the event host at Annie Bloom’s Books, a beloved Portland institution.

Tracy DeBrincat’s (’96) new short story collection Troglodyte was awarded the Elixir Prize and was published in January 2014 (Elixir Press). She is also author of the novel Hollywood Buckaroo (Big Moose Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2012) and story collection Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night (Innovative Fiction Prize, Subito Press 2010). Her short stories and poetry have been published in journals from Another Chicago Magazine to Zyzzyva and authors the blog Bigfoot Lives!

Terry DeHart (’96) is a former Marine and ex-NASA contractor. His first novel, The Unit, a post-apocalyptic thriller, was published in 2010 as part of a two-book deal with Orbit Books. The Unit was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2011. His short stories have appeared in In Posse Review, Paumanok Review, Vestal Review, Barcelona Review, Zoetrope All-Story Extra, Night Train, Smokelong Quarterly,Opium and elsewhere. Three of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s (’92) latest book is Palm Springs Noir (Akashic), which she edited and contributed a story. Writing noir fiction began with the short story, “Crazy for You,” first published in the Akashic anthology, Orange County Noir, later included in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. Her fiction and poetry has been published in Coolest American Stories 2022, CrimeReads, Dark City Crime & Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Crossing Borders, Shotgun Honey, The Literary Hatchet, Rock and a Hard Place, Paradigm Shifts, Broad River Review, Serial Magazine, Beach Reads, and The Oyez Review. Her first book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller and honored with an American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Rowboat,” in Kelp Journal (Dec. 2023). 

Timothy Denevi (’09) is the author of Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism (PublicAffairs, 2018) and Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD (Simon & Schuster, 2014). His essays on politics, sport, and religion have recently appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Salon, The Normal School, and Literary Hub. He received his MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and he’s been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Tim is an assistant professor at George Mason University and lives near Washington, DC.

Melissa DeCarlo (’14) has worked as an artist, graphic designer, grant writer and at one time (that time being when computers were the size of a refrigerator) a computer programmer. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she now lives in East Texas with her husband and a motley crew of rescue animals. The Art of Crash Landing (Harper, 2015) is her first novel.

Fred Dillen (’76) has written three novels: Hero (Steerforth), Fool (Algonquin), and Beauty (Simon and Schuster). Hero got noticed in the NY Sunday Times, the TLS, and as a Best First Novel in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Fred’s screenplay of Hero was developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and subsequently optioned. Beauty was a Favorite Book of 2014 in the Wall Street Journal and was optioned in manuscript for a film. Fool got admiring notice in the Sunday Times, was reprinted in Nancy Pearl’s rediscovery series and optioned for a film.

Heather Donahue (’08) is best known as Rei Hance of the Blair Witch Project. Her memoir Growgirl: The Blossoming of an Unlikely Outlaw (Gotham/Penguin) was published in 2012.

Katherine Easer (’08) is the author of Vicious Little Darlings (Bloomsbury, 2011). She was born in Kansas, raised in Southern California, and now she lives in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Smith College and a member ofthe Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

Carol Edgarian (’88) is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Rise the Euphrates, Three Stages of Amazement, and Vera. She is a leading force in bringing diverse voices to the fore as co-founder and editor of the non-profit publisher Narrative. Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers.

Jennifer Egan’s (’89) is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read.  Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly.  Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023.

Cai Emmons (1951-2023) (’93, ’94, ’98) is the author of the novels His Mother’s Son (Harcourt), The Stylist (HarperCollins), and Weather Woman(Red Hen Press), and a sequel to Weather Woman, called Sinking Islands (Red Hen Press), UNLEASHED(Dutton), and LIVID (Red Hen Press). Her story collection Vanishing, winner of the 2018 Leapfrog Fiction Contest was published in March 2020. Emmons’s short fiction and essays have appeared in such periodicals as The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Today, LitHub, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, TriQuarterly, Narrative, Arts and Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, The Santa Monica Review, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The New York Post, and Portland Monthly. A story of hers was a finalist for the Missouri Review Jeffrey Smith Editor’s Prize; another was a finalist in the Narrative Fiction Contest. She has received fellowships at The Albee Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Playa, Caldera, and Moulin a Nef in France, and has been interviewed on a variety of podcasts including Final Draft, A Mighty Blaze, and Give and Take.

Maria Espinosa (’93) is a novelist, poet, and translator as well as a teacher. Her publications include five novels: Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew, Dark Plums, Longing, which received an American Book Award,  as well as Dying Unfinished, which received a Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence from PEN Oakland. Her fifth and most recent novel, Suburban Souls, tells a tale of Jewish German Holocaust survivors in 1970’s San Francisco.  She has also published two collections of poems, Love Feelings, and Night Music, and a critically acclaimed translation of George Sand’s novel, Lelia. Espinosa is concerned with human communication on a level that transcends the norms permitted by society. Her novels focus on the subtle as well as the obvious forces that shape a human being.

Farnaz Fatemi (’14) is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. Her book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, was chosen by Tracy K. Smith as winner of the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Sister Tongue was published by Kent State University Press on August 31, 2022. She is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. She was formerly a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Merrill Feitell (’93), author of Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes (Iowa Short Fiction Award Winner), served on faculty in the MFA program at University of Maryland and has taught fiction writing at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, SUNY Purchase, Colorado College and Cal State San Bernardino. Merrill’s fiction has appeared in many publications, including Best New American Voices and has earned her fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Taos Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Bethesda Writers’ Center, which named her an Emerging Writer Fellow.

Barbara Fischkin (’95) is the author of three books: Muddy Cup: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America (Scribner, 1997), a work of narrative nonfiction, and two satiric novels Exclusive, and Confidential Sources (Bantam Dell 2005, 2006). Muddy Cup: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in A New America is frequently used as a required text at colleges and universities. She was awarded a Dean’s Medal from the State University of New York’s Empire State College for graduate work which included writing chapters for the historical novel she is currently working on.

Richard Fords (’70, ’71) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Bascombe novels and the New York Times bestselling Canada and Let Me Be Frank with You. His novels and story collections include The Sportswriter, Independence Day, A Multitude of Sins, Rock Springs The Lay of the Land, Canada and Let Me be Frank With You. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first time the same book had won both prizes. His most recent book, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, was published by Ecco in April, 2017. Ford is the 2016 recipient of the Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, and he lives in East Boothbay, Maine with his wife, Kristina Ford. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers for many years.

Photo Credit: Laura Wilson

Vicki Forman (’94) is the author of This Lovely Life:  A Memoir of Premature Motherhood (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books), winner of the PEN Center Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize and was selected as a 100 Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review as well as the anthologies, Love You to Pieces:  Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, and Literary Mama:  Reading for the Maternally Inclined.  She wrote a column at Literary Mama for several years, has been a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a resident at the Cottages at Hedgebrook.

Laurie Frankel (’05) is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of five novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Publisher’s Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes full-time in Seattle, Washington where she lives with her family and makes good soup.

Martha Frankel (’98) is the author of the 2008 memoir, Hats & Eyeglasses, chronicling her family’s lifelong love affair with gambling (Tarcher/Penguin). She began her writing career at the original Details magazine, and went on to write book reviews, essays and celebrity profiles for other magazines, such as Movieline, Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker. Her second book, Brazilian Sexy: Secrets to Living a Gorgeous and Confident Life (co-written with Janea Padilha) was published in April 2010 (Perigee/Penguin Group). She is the executive director of the Woodstock Writers Festival, and the creator of the always wait-listed class, Write As If No One Is Reading Over Your Shoulder. She is a winner of a NYFFA grant in nonfiction literature, a fellow at the MacDowell colony, and an Artist-in-Residence at SUNY Ulster.

Amy Franklin-Willis (’05, ’06, ’09, ’13), born in Birmingham, Alabama, is an eighth generation Southerner. She received an Emerging Writer Grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation to complete The Lost Saints of Tennessee (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), a novel inspired by stories of her father’s childhood in rural Pocahontas, Tennessee. Franklin-Willis lives with her family in Northern California. Upcoming writing projects include The Wife Uprising, her second adult novel; and Girl of Wonder, her first young adult novel.

Darien Gee (’99) is the national bestselling author of three novels written under the name Mia King (Good Things, Sweet Life, and Table Manners, all published by Berkley Books). Her fourth novel, Friendship Bread (Ballantine Books/Random House) was released in April 2011 under her own name, as was her fifth novel, The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society, which was released in April 2013. Darien is a former Bay Area resident who served on the board of directors for ZYZZYVA and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. In October 2023, she was appointed the Third Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Connecticut.

Aleta George is the author of Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate (Shifting Plates Press, 2015). She graduated with honors from San Francisco State University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in geography. Aleta writes about nature and culture in California, and her articles and essays have appeared in Smithsonian, High Country News, Bay Nature, and several travel anthologies. She attended the Community of Writers in 2005 and 2010. www.aletageorge.com

Tanya Egan Gibson‘s debut novel, How to Buy a Love of Reading, was published by Dutton in May 2009. She attended the Community of Writers in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004.
www.howtobuyaloveofreading.com

Jeff Gillenkirk is an author, journalist, and communications consultant for a wide array of foundations, non-profit and political organizations. His first novel, Home, Away was published by Chin Music Press (Seattle) in 2010. In 2011 Nine Mile Press published his second novel, Pursuit of Darkness. He is also the author of the non-fiction book Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town (Nine Mile Press), now in its sixth printing. His articles and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Parenting magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, America, and other publications. He attended the Community of Writers in 1976. http://www.bittermelonbook.com/authors.html

John J. Gobbell is a former Navy Lieutenant who saw duty in the South China Sea as a destroyer weapons officer. His thirty plus year career in executive recruiting included clients in the military and commercial aerospace sectors, giving him added insight into character development for his novels. He has written seven historical thrillers about the U.S. Navy – Pacific Theater; the newest, Edge of Valor, was released summer, 2014 by the United States Naval Institute Press. He is at work on his eighth and lives with his wife, Janine, in Newport Beach, California. John attended the Community of Writers in 1989. www.JohnJGobbell.com

Michael Golding is the author of the novels Simple Prayers and Benjamin’s Gift, both published by Warner Books. His work has been translated into ten foreign languages. His translation of Alessandro Baricco’s stage play Novecento opened the 2002 Edinburgh Festival, and his screenplay adaptation of Mr. Baricco’s novel Silk, starring Keira Knightley and Alfred Molina, was a featured selection at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Michael’s new novel, A Poet of the Invisible World, was published by Picador in the fall of 2015.  www.michaelgoldingwriter.com

Christine Granados was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. She has worked as a journalist for the El Paso Times and the Austin American-Statesman. Currently she is a reporter for the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post. Her second book of fiction, Fight Like a Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children, was published by the University of New Mexico Press, March 1, 2017. She attended the Community of Writers in 2009. www.christinegranados.com

Suzanne Greenberg’s novel Lesson Plans was published by Prospect Park Books in May, 2014. Chosen as a Library Journal Editor’s Pick, Lesson Plans was named “One of 7 Great Books from Small Presses that are Worth Your Time,” by Reader’s Digest. Her short story collection, Speed-Walk and Other Stories, won the 2003 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She’s the co-author with Lisa Glatt of two children’s novels,Abigail Iris: The One and Only and Abigail Iris: The Pet Project, published by Walker Books. Her creative work has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, Mississippi Review and West Branch, among other journals. She’s the co-author of Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink, (McGraw Hill). Suzanne teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach, where she’s a professor of English. She attended the Community of Writers in 1999. www.suzannegreenberg.com

Alan Grostephan is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College. He has also taught at Knox College and St. Paul University in Minnesota. TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press published his book, Bogota: A Novel, in 2013, which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize and was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction of 2013. Alan has an MFA from UC Irvine, and attended the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in 2009.

Lise Haines is the author of three novels. Girl in the Arena, a South Carolina Book Award nominee in 2011, was published in the US (Bloomsbury). Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books) was a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006” by San Diego’s NPR station. In My Sister’s Country, (Penguin/Putnam), was a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Haines has sold foreign rights and movie options. She is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College and has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard. Haines holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. www.lisehaines.com

Daniel Hallford is the author of 3 books: Pelican Bay, a novel about ex-cons; Upper Noe, a memoir about a boy growing up in San Francisco; and his latest, Tattooed Love Dogs, a collection of short stories. He divides his time between San Francisco and Truckee, California. He attended the Community of Writers in 2005. danielhallford.com

Seré Prince Halverson is the author of the novel The Underside of Joy (Dutton, 2012), an international bestseller that was translated into eighteen languages. Her second novel, All the Winters After, was published in the US in January 2016. It was released as The House of Frozen Dreams in the UK in 2015 and is forthcoming in Germany. She and her husband live in Northern California and have four grown children. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006. www.sereprincehalverson.com

Masha Hamilton is the author of five novels, most recently What Changes Everything (2013), which the Washington Post praised for its “elegantly wrought prose (which) conveys terror as well as tenderness,” and 31 Hours, chosen by thePost as one of the best novels of 2009. Staircase of a Thousand Steps (2001) was a Booksense pick by independent booksellers and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; The Distance Between Us (2004), was a Library Journal best book of the year; The Camel Bookmobile (2007), was also a Booksense pick. She founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. She is the winner of the 2010 Women’s National Book Association award. For the AP, the Los Angeles Times and others, she has reported from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She recently completed 16 months as Communications Director at the US Embassy in Afghanistan and currently works as Vice President of Communications for the NGO Concern Worldwide. She attended the Community of Writers in 2000. www.mashahamilton.com

Michael Harris is an Army veteran of Vietnam, who has worked as a Forest Service aide, a janitor and an English conversation teacher in Tokyo and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For 30 years, he was a reporter, editor and book reviewer for West Coast newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. His first novel, The Chieu Hoi Saloon, was published by PM Press in October 2010. He attended the Community of Writers in 2008.

Judith Hendricks is the author of the novels Bread Alone, Isabelle’s Daughter, The Baker’s Apprentice, and The Laws of Harmony. Her writing has been translated into 11 languages. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband. Her newest novel, Baker’s Blues, was published by Chien Bleu Press in 2015. She attended the Community of Writers in 1997.  www.judihendricks.com

Sara J. Henry’s first novel, Learning to Swim (Crown, 2011), which won the Anthony and Agatha awards for best first novel and the Mary Higgins Clark Award, was a Target Emerging Author Editions pick, and was named one of Best Books of 2011 by the Boston Globe. Her second novel, A Cold and Lonely Place (Crown, 2013), was a Reader’s Digest Select Books choice and won the Silver Falchion award for best novel. Both novels are set in the Adirondacks, where Sara began her writing career as a newspaper sports editor. She’s written for Prevention, Bicycling, Triathlete, and other magazines, and was an editor at Rodale Books and Women’s Sports & Fitness. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006 (fiction) and 2007 (nonfiction).  www.sarajhenry.com

Peggy Hesketh is a former Southern California journalist. Her creative writing has appeared in Calliope and the Antietam Review, and her short story “A Madness of Two” was selected by Elizabeth George for inclusion in her anthology Two of the Deadliest. Peggy currently teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine and a fiction writing workshop at the Laguna College of Art and Design. Telling the Bees, her first novel, was published by Putnam in 2013. She first attended the Community of Writers in 1994. www.peggyhesketh.com

Sheila Himmel‘s new book, co-written with Fran Smith, is Changing the Way We Die: Compassionate End-of-LIfe Care and the Hospice Movement (Viva Editions, December 2013). A James Beard Award-winner, Sheila writes for publications ranging from the New York Times to Eating Well to IEEE Spectrum: The Magazine of Technology Insiders, andpsychologytoday.com. Her memoir of being a food writer with an anorexic daughter is Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia (Penguin/Berkley, 2009). She attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.sheilahimmel.com

Parul Kapur Hinzen (’19) was born in Assam, India, and grew up in Connecticut. Her fiction centers on the experience of immigration, displacement, and colonialism. She is currently working on a novel about love and corruption in the aftermath of the devastating 1947 Partition of India. Her first novel, Inside the Mirror, was a finalist for the 2013 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize awarded by Catapult’s Black Balloon Press. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Midway Journal, Wascana Review, Frank, Prime Number and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. As a journalist and literary critic, she has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, Newsday, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate.

Greg Hrbek’s Not on Fire, but Burning was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and an NPR Best Book of 2015. His first novel, The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, won the James Jones First Novel Award. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories anthology. A first collection of stories, Destroy All Monsters, was awarded the 2010 Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction.

Rhoda Huffey is the author of The Hallelujah Side, a novel, and has published stories in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, Santa Monica Review, and Rattling Wall. She has an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. She lives in Venice Beach and is a tap dancer. She first attended the Community of Writers in 1988 and frequently returns on staff.

Maria Hummel is the author of Motherland, a novel, which earned starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus, and was one of BookPage’s top 20 books of 2014. Her poetry collection House and Fire won the 2013 APR/Honickman Prize, and her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in the Pushcart Prizes, Narrative, The Sun, and New England Review. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and teaches at the University of Vermont. She attended the Community of Writers in 2009. www.mariahummel.com

Gina Hyams is an author and editor who specializes in mysterious and confounding subjects, such as pie, nannies, extraterrestrial encounters, the history of incense, folk art, facials, pink palapas, death, and picnics. She has published 12 books, among them The Tanglewood Picnic: Music and Outdoor Feasts in the Berkshires (Muddy Puppy Media), Country Living Decorating with White (Hearst), and In a Mexican Garden: Courtyards, Pools, and Open-Air Living Rooms (Chronicle Books). She is also the creator of the “In a Box” series of culinary contest book-kits published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. Gina participated in the Community of Writers in 2001. www.ginahyams.com

Gordon Jack is a writer of Young Adult fiction. His first novel, The Boomerang Effect, was published by HarperCollins in 2016. Gordon has a MA in Education from Stanford and MA in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. He currently works as a high school librarian in Los Altos, California and lives with his wife and son in San Francisco. He attended the Community of Writers in 2003 and 2008. www.gordon-jack.com

Buzzy Jackson is the author of The Inspirational Atheist: Wise Words on the Wonder and Meaning of Life (Penguin: 2015) as well as Shaking the Family Tree: Blue Bloods, Black Sheep, and other Obsessions of an Accidental Genealogist (Simon & Schuster, 2010), A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (W.W. Norton: 2005) and the novel Effie Perine. She has a Ph.D. in U.S. History from UC Berkeley and her work has been honored by PEN-West and the American Library Association. Buzzy is a Research Affiliate at The Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Correspondent for the Boston Globe. She attended the Community of Writers in 1993, 1997 and 2001. ww.buzzyjackson.com

Lindsey Lee Johnson is the author of the novel The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, published by  Random House in January 2017. Her previous work has appeared in Telling, Eleven Eleven, Seele, Earthwords, Angeleno, and LIFE. In 2006, her book The Art of Decanting: Bringing Wine to Life was published by Chronicle Books. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and has taught writing at USC, Clark College, and Portland State University. She’s also served as a tutor and mentor at a learning center in Marin County, California, where her focus has been teaching writing to teenagers. She divides her time, and her heart, between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended the Community of Writers in 2013. www.lindseyleejohnson.com

Cindy Jones is the author of My Jane Austen Summer (Wm. Morrow/Harper Collins, 2011), winner of the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest 2007. She is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and blogs with austenauthors.net and girlfriendbooks.blogspot.com. She attended Squaw in 2007. www.cindysjones.com

Matthew F. Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Cooter Farm, The Elements of Hitting, A Single Shot, Blind Pursuit, Deepwater, and Boot Tracks, as well as a number of screenplays. His novel A Single Shot (FSG, 1996) was reissued in fall 2011, with a forward by Daniel Woodrell, as the first novel in Mulholland Books series of classic noir novels. His screenplay adaptation of A Single Shot was directed by David Rosenthal and starred Sam Rockwell, Jeffrey Wright, Kelly Reilly, Jason Issacs, Ted Levine, and William H. Macy. It debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013. His novel, Deepwater, was made into a film in 2005, starring Lucas Black, Peter Coyote and Mia Maestro. He attended the Community of Writers in 1990. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. www.matthewfjones.com

Kathryn Jordan’s novel, Hot Water, was published by Berkley/Penguin in 2006. She has an M.A. in English from U.C.L.A. and taught in Spain, the Philippines and at Cairo American College in Egypt, where her new novel In The Time Of Apricots is set. Her articles have appeared in such diverse publications as Palm Springs Life, Westways, Ranger Rick, Silk, and Diver Magazine, (reprinted in a book, A Diver’s Guide to Underwater America). Kathryn attended Squaw Valley in 1997. She lives on an acre in Bermuda Dunes, California with her Arabian horse, Abu. http://kathrynjordan.com/

Judy Juanita‘s debut novel, Virgin Soul, was published by Viking in 2013. The High Cost of Freeways, her short story collection, was a finalist in the Donna Tartt First Fiction Contest 2014. An essay collection, De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland, was published in September 2016. Her poem “Bling” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. She attended Breadloaf and Vermont Studio Center in 2012. She teaches writing at Laney College in Oakland and attended the Community of Writers in 1992.www.judyjuanitasvirginsoul.com

Parul Kapur’s (’19) short fiction centers on the aftermath of colonialism in India and the lives of Indian immigrants. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Wascana Review, Prime Number, Midway Journal, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. As a journalist and critic, she has written for The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ARTnews, Art in America, Guernica, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She spent a decade in Germany, France, and England, contributing articles and reviews to The Wall Street Journal Europe and New York Newsday. Parul founded the Books page at ArtsATL, Atlanta’s leading online arts publication, and headed literary coverage there for several years. The Hambidge Center, Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts have awarded her writing fellowships.

Lauren Kate is the internationally best-selling author of Teardrop (Random House, Delacorte), the Fallen novels (Random House, Delacorte), and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (Penguin, Razorbill). Her work has been translated into over 30 languages. She has a masters degree in fiction from UC Davis and has worked as a fiction editor at HarperCollins. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006. She lives in Los Angeles. laurenkatebooks.net

Alma Katsu is the author of several novels published by Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, most recently The Hunger (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). Her debut, The Taker, was selected a top ten debut novel of 2011 by Booklist and has been published in 16 languages. She attended the Community of Writers for the first time in 2003, and has returned since. www.almakatsu.com

Dasha Kelly is a writer, performer, facilitator and carrot cake connoisseur. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, text books, magazines and online. Dasha performs and delivers workshops to writers, youth, educators, executives, inmates, co-eds and artists throughout the U.S. She has made three trips to Botswana as an Arts Envoy for the U.S. Embassy. She is founder and director of a social profit organization that utilizes the process of writing and the power of spoken performance to build communities, craft and courage. She was a finalist for the 2014-2016 Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Her novel, Almost Crimson (Curbside Splendor 2015) earned strong national reviews and is being considered as a stage play. She attended the Community of Writers in 2012.  www.dashakelly.com

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods, published by FSG in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program. She attended the Community of Writers in 2015.

R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, was published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago (U.K.), and will be released by Einaudi (Italy) and Agora (Poland). She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in South Korea, she’s mostly lived in the United States. She attended the Community of Writers in 2010.

Celeste León is the author of Luck is Just the Beginning, released by Floricanto Press in 2015. The novel, inspired by a true story, earned a Mariposa Award for Best First Book in the 2016 International Latino Book Awards and Finalist in Multicultural Fiction in the 2016 International Book Awards. It was selected as Book of The Month by Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club. Ms. León was named “One of Ten Latina Authors to Watch and Read” by the Latina Book Club of New York. Her personal essay, “Finding Home,” about her travels to Puerto Rico, won First Prize in the Annual Contest for High Sierra Writers of Reno, Nevada. Celeste lives in Truckee, CA where she also practices as a physical therapist. She attended the Community of Writers in 2013. www.celesteleon.com

Margit Liesche is the author of the historical mysteries, Lipstick and Lies and Hollywood Buzz. The daughter of Hungarian refugees, she has woven facts from her family history into her latest novel, Triptych, which was released in October 2013. Margit appeared on the PBS program, History Detectives, as an expert on a segment involving the true spy ring featured in her first novel, Lipstick and Lies. She attended the Community of Writers in 2003. www.margitliesche.com

Aimee Liu’s work includes the novels Flash House; Cloud Mountain; and Face, and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders, and Solitaire, as well as the nonfiction book Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders. She is the editor of The Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, and Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders.Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She also has co-authored more than seven books on health and psychological topics. Liu holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a past president of PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. She attended the Community of Writers in 1994. www.aimeeliu.net

Dixon Long lives in Mill Valley, California. Before moving to the Bay Area, he was professor of Political Science and dean of Western Reserve College at Case Western Reserve University. His account of building a 42-foot yawl in Japan and sailing across the Indian and South Atlantic oceans with two friends is titled Westward Home. His first novel, Brothers, was published in 2001. A Very Rich Man, about a wealthy but dysfunctional family, came out in 2009. Running Without Lights, an international romantic thriller, was published in June 2010. He has co-authored two guidebooks, Markets of Provence and Markets of Paris. www.dixonlong.com

Li Miao Lovett is the author of the novel, In the Lap of the Gods (Leapfrog Press, 2010) a tale of the dammed and displaced in China’s Three Gorges. In 2013 Li was awarded a major grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to produce a radio program about pesticide exposure. She has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, New America Media, and KQED “Perspectives.” In both fiction and nonfiction, Li’s work has won awards or finalist standing from Glimmer Train, Writer’s Digest, Stanford Magazine,National League of American Pen Women, and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Li attended the Community of Writers in 2006. www.limiaolovett.com

Leza Lowitz is a multi-genre writer and editor. She has published over 17 books, and has received the PEN Josephine Miles Award in Poetry for Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, grants from the NEA and NEH, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the translation of Japanese literature, and the 2014 APALA Award in Youth Literature from the American Librarian’s Association for her debut YA novel, Jet Black and the Ninja Wind (Tuttle Publishing). Her memoir on adapting and adopting in Japan, Here Comes The Sun, was published by Stone Bridge Press in 2015. Essays from Lowitz’s memoir have appeared in the New York Times “Motherlode” column, Yoga Journal, The Huffington Post, Shambhala Sun, and Best Buddhist Writing. Her young adult novel in verse, Up from the Sea, was released by Crown Children’s (Random House) in 2016. Lowitz, a yoga teacher, also runs her own studio in Tokyo, where she lives with her husband and their young son. She attended the Community of Writers in 1999. www.lezalowitz.com

Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, which won the 2013 Indiefab Award’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. She’s the recipient of the Austin Public Library Foundation’s 2014 Emerging Writer Award, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Ragdale Foundation, the Kerouac Project, and Jentel Arts. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, O, the Oprah Magazine, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, and other publications. She is a Contributing Editor for Electric Literature and a 2016-17 Radcliffe Institute fellow. Her debut novel, Pull Me Under, was published in 2016 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. www.kellyluce.com

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, was published in March, 2o18, by Spiegel & Grau. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He lives in Oakland. www.michaeldavidlukas.com

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming With Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her stories have been published in One Story, The American Scholar, Willow Springs, and other journals. She has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Kirsten teaches at the Attic Learning Community in Woodinville, Washington and at the Hugo House in Seattle. She attended the Community of Writers in 2002 and returned as an alumni reader in 2005. www.kirstenlunstrum.net

Kerri Majors is the author of This Is Not A Writing Manual: Notes For the Young Writer In the Real World, which SLJ called a “must-read” for aspiring writers. She is also the editor and founder of YARN, the first independent journal of YA literature to publish teens and adults side by side (www.yareview.net); YARN was the recipient of an Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation. Kerri grew up in California’s central valley and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and daughter. Her short fiction and essays can be found in Guernica, Midwest Quarterly, So To Speak, among other journals. Her new novel, The Debutante: A Novel of Kick Kennedy, is forthcoming from Berkeley in 2018. She attended the Community of Writers in 2003. www.kerrimajors.com

Annam Manthiram is the author of the novel, After the Tsunami (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), Finalist in the 2012 NM/AZ Book Awards, and a short story collection Dysfunction: Stories (Aqueous Books, 2012), Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest. A graduate of the M.A. Writing program at the University of Southern California, Ms. Manthiram resides in New Mexico with her husband, Alex, and sons, Sathya and Anand. She attended the Community of Writers in 2010.
www.annammanthiram.com

Marisa Matarazzo is the author of Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her stories have been published in Faultline and Hobart. She is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and is currently at work on a second novel. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006.
www.marisamatarazzo.com

Mark Maynard is the winner of the 2015 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His linked short story collection, Grind, was published by Torrey House Press in 2012, and has been selected as the 2016-2017 Nevada Reads book. He is currently the Program Coordinator for Nevada Humanities, focusing on bringing Pulitzer Prize winning authors and journalists to events throughout the state. His work has been published in Lunch Ticket, Our Stories, Shelf Life Magazine, the Ploughshares Literary Boroughs blog, and the Nottingham Review (UK). He lives in Sparks, Nevada. He attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.markmaynard.info

Stephanie McCoy is the author of Sweet as Cane, published by Pen & Mouse Books in in 2012. She received her BA and MFA from Mills College. In between degrees she was a Fulbright Fellow in Hamburg, Germany. In 1998 her book Brilliance in the Shadows: A Biography of Lucia Kleinhans Matthews, was published by the Arts & Crafts Press. Stephanie currently lives in Northern California. She attended the Community of Writers in 1996. www.stephaniemccoyauthor.com

Mike Medberry has served as a senior environmentalist for several local and national conservation organizations and has an MFA from the University of Washington. Over the past years he has written fiction and nonfiction for Blue Review, High Country News, Wilderness Magazine, Black Canyon Quarterly, Hooked on the Outdoors, Stroke Connection, Idaho Magazine, Boise Weekly, Sun Valley Magazine, Northern Lights, and the e-magazine Writer’s Workshop. His book, On the Dark Side of the Moon, was published by Caxton Press in 2013 and he was an Artist in Residence for the City of Boise in 2011-12. He also wrote book reviews, blogs, and opinion editorials to inform readers on environmental policies. Mike attended the Community of Writers in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2011. www.mikemedberry.com

D. P. Medina is the author of the new novel, The Madness of the Brave, published by Moonshine Cove in 2018. A former international marketing executive, he has contributed material to numerous industry magazines and published fiction in SpokeWrite. He attended the University of Southern California and has an MFA from Eastern Washington University where he was Fiction Editor of Willow Springs. He attended the Community of Writers in ’85 and ’86.

Christina Meldrum is the author of Madapple (Knopf), a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award and the William C. Morris Award, an ALA Best Book, a Booklist Editors’ Choice and a Kirkus Best Book. Her second novel, Amaryllis In Blueberry, was published in February 2011 by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Her third novel is slated for publication by Knopf in 2015.
www.christinameldrum.com

Maile Meloy grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, Do Not Become Alarmed, was released by Riverhead Books in June, 2017.  Her first book for young readers, The Apothecary, was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2012 E.B. White Award. It was followed by two sequels, The Apprentices (2013) and The After Room (2015).  She is also the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the story collectionsHalf in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Her short story, “Madame Lazarus,” originally published in The New Yorker, is in The Best American Short Stories 2015, edited by T.C. Boyle. Meloy’s stories have also been published in The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists.  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O. She attended the Community of Writers in 2000.  www.mailemeloy.com

Deborah Michel‘s second novel, The Idiot of Silicon Valley, was published by Riverhead in early 2016. Her first novel, Prosper in Love, came out in 2012. Before that, Michel worked as a magazine writer and editor for a long list of publications that includes House Beautiful, Premiere, Self, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Buzz. She was a nightlife columnist for Avenue, and the West Coast correspondent for Spy. She has an MFA in Fiction from Bennington and attended the Community of Writers in 2005. www.deborahmichel.net

Donna Miscolta’s first novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced was published in June 2011 by Signal 8 Press. Her second book, a collection of short stories entitled Hola and Goodbye, was released by Carolina Wren Press in 2016. Her unpublished collection of short stories Natalie Wood’s Fake Puerto Rican Accent was a finalist for the 2010 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in America’s Review, Calyx, Cha: An Asian Literary Review, Connecticut Review, New Millennium Writings, Raven Chronicles andSeattle Magazine. She has been awarded residencies from Anderson Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has received over a dozen grants and awards, including the Bread Load/Rona Jaffe Scholarship for Fiction. She attended the Community of Writers in 1998. donnamiscolta.com

Lee Montgomery is the author of a memoir The Things Between Us, a book of stories Whose World Is This?, and the illustrated novella, Searching for Emily. The Things Between Us received the Oregon Book Award and Whose World Is This? received the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her past editorial work has included fiction editor for the Iowa Review, editor of the Santa Monica Review, executive editor at Tin House magazine and editorial director of Tin House Books. Other work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Oprah, Glimmer Train, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, among many others. She attended the Community of Writers in 1999, and returned as part of the Published Alumni Reading Series in 2007.

Lisa Braver Moss is the award winning author of the novels The Measure of His Grief (Notim Press, 2010) and Shrug (She Writes Press, 2019). Her essays have appeared in Parents, the Huffington Post, Lilith, and many other publications.

Lisa’s nonfiction book credits include Celebrating Family: Our Lifelong Bonds with Parents and Siblings (Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999) and, as co-author, The Mother’s Companion: A Comforting Guide to the Early Years of Motherhood (Council Oak Books, 2001). She is the co-author of Celebrating Brit Shalom (Notim Press, 2015), the first-ever book of ceremonies and music for Jewish families seeking alternatives to circumcision. Lisa is also President and Co-Founder of Bruchim, a nonprofit that sparks Jewish engagement among non-circumcising families and matches them with welcoming communities.

Born in Berkeley, California, Lisa still lives in the area with her husband, with whom she has two grown sons.

She attended the Community of Writers in 2003. www.lisabravermoss.com

Jaclyn Moyer (’17) grew up in northern California’s Sierra Foothills. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, Salon, Guernica, Orion, Ninth Letter and other publications. She’s received fellowships and support from Fishtrap, Wildbranch Writing Workshop, The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, Community of Writers, and Spring Creek Project, and was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize. Her first book of nonfiction, On Gold Hill, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in March 2024. 

Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, The Hopwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles from Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009. She has garnered fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. In 2011 she became a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing and Chicago. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Evergreen Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in Chicago.

www.namimun.com

Linda Joy Myers (’94): Linda Joy Myers is the President and founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers, Instructor at Writers Digest, past president of the California Writers Club, Marin branch, and past Vice President of the Women’s National Book Association. Linda is the author of three books: The Power of Memoir—How to Write Your Healing Story, published by Jossey Bass; Becoming Whole, a finalist in the ForeWord magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year Award, and the award winning memoir Don’t Call Me Mother, which won the BAIPA Gold Medal prize. Linda has won prizes for her fiction, memoir and poetry: First Prize, Jessamyn West Fiction Contest; Finalist, San Francisco Writing Contest for Secret Music, a novel about the Kindertransport; First Prize, poetry, East of Eden Contest, and for memoir writing First Prize Carol Landauer Life Writing Contest. Linda’s next book is Truth or Lie: on the Cusp of Memoir and Fiction. She gives workshops nationally, and helps people develop their stories through coaching, editing, and online workshops. www.namw.org. Her blog is www.memoriesandmemoirs.com

Denise Nicholas, actress and novelist, is best known for her roles on ABC TV’s Room 222 for which she received two Golden Globe Nominations and on In the Heat of the Night(NBC) for which she also wrote. She is the author of the novel Freshwater Road, published by Agate in 2005 and included in the Best Books of that year by The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Newsday and the Chicago Tribune. Freshwater Road received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was a Books Sense Pick. In 2006, Denise won the Best First Novel Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus and the Zora Neal Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. She attended the Community of Writers in 2001.

Kim O’Neil teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago, where is she a senior lecturer in English and assistant director of the Writing Center. Her short stories have appeared in Faultline, Packingtown Review, and Orange Coast Review. Her first book, Fever Dogs, a collection of linked stories, was published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in the summer of 2017. She attended the Community of Writers in 2009.

Varley O’Connor is the author of four novels, The Master’s Muse (Scribner, 2012), The Cure (Bellevue Literary Press, 2007), A Company of Three (Algonquin, 2003), and Like China (William Morrow, 1991). Her short prose has appeared in The Missouri Review, Santa Monica Review, The Sun Magazine, AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Faultline: Journal of Art and Literature, Driftwood, The MacGuffin, and in an anthology, Naming the World and Other Exercises for Creative Writers (Random House, 2008). An MFA fiction graduate in The Programs in Writing at UC Irvine, she is currently Associate Professor at Kent State University, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction writing for the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. In 2015, she was visiting fiction writer at UC Irvine. She first attended the Community of Writers in 1989 and has returned in recent years to serve on the staff. www.varleyoconnor.com

Jessica O’Dwyer is the author of the book, Mamalita: An Adoption Memoir, published by Avalon Travel/Seal Press in 2010. She is the adoptive mother to two children born in Guatemala. Her essays have been published in the New York Times; San Francisco Chronicle Magazine; Brain, Child; Adoptive Families; and the West Marin Review. Jessica has worked in public relations and marketing at SFMOMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006 and 2007, and has since returned as staff.  www.mamalitathebook.com

Regina O’Melveny is the author of The Book of Madness & Cures, published by Little, Brown and Company in April 2012. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Bellingham Review, rattapallax, The Sun, The LA Weekly, Solo and The Wild Duck Review. New work was recently released in the anthology, Beyond the Lyric Moment. Her awards include the John Foster West National Poetry Award Contest judged by Marge Piercy and the 2007 Conflux Press Poetry Award. Her manuscript, Blue Wolves, won the Bright Hill poetry book award. She has taught at The Palos Verdes Art Center, The South Coast Botanic Garden, and Marymount College. She attended the Community of Writers in 1992, 2002 and 2008.

Mary Otis is the award-winning author of the short story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries. Her debut novel, Burst, was published by Zibby Books in April 2023. Her stories and essays have been published in Best New American Voices, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and in many other venues. Her story “Pilgrim Girl” received an honorable mention for a Pushcart Prize, and her story “Unstruck” was a Distinguished Story of the Year in Best American Short Stories. Mary is a fiction professor in the UC Riverside MFA Program and was honored to deliver the commencement speech for the graduating class of 2013. She is currently at work on a novel, excerpts of which were recently published in Zyzzyva andThe Los Angeles Review of Books Special Fiction Issue. Mary attended the Community of Writers in 2000 and 2001. www.maryotis.com

David Page is a national award-winning journalist and senior correspondent for Powder Magazine based in Mammoth Lakes, California. He has written for the Discovery Channel, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Ski, Skiing, The New York Times, Outside, TakePart.com, and many other publications. His series on decision-making in avalanche terrain, The Human Factor, was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award. His longform narrative on traveling with a medical team into the eye of Super Typhoon Haiyan was awarded Best Dramatic Narrative of 2015 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He is also the author of the Lowell Thomas Award-winning Explorer’s Guide to Yosemite & the Southern Sierra Nevada (Countryman Press/W.W. Norton), now in its second printing. His work has been anthologized in the collection Travel Stories from Around the Globe, edited by National Geographic Traveler’s Don George, and the 2013 California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Golden State (Outpost 19). www.sierrasurvey.com/davidtpage/

Richard Peterson is the author of Looking at Painting in Florence, 13th-16th Centuries. A Learner’s Handbook (Polistampa, Florence, 2014). The handbook is intended to bridge the gap between the guidebook and the serious academic text. He is a regular contributor to The Florentine, a magazine for expats living in Florence. He attended the Community of Writers in 2010 and 2011. www.lookingatpaintinginflorence.com

Bill Pieper‘s most recent book is a collection titled Forgive Me, Father, published by Cold River Press in December, 2014. Two of the dozen stories included were workshopped at Squaw Valley, two others received Pushcart Prize nominations in 2012, and a third won a national award from Scratch Writer Magazine in 2011. His work has also appeared in The Farallon Review, Red Fez, Convergence, Primal Urge, Fiction 365 and The Blue Lake Review. Prior to launching into short fiction, Bill had two small press novels published, Belonging from Comstock Bonanza Press in 2006 and What You Wish For from Pacific Slope Press in 2011. He lives and writes in Sacramento and Nevada City, California, and attended the Community of Writers in 2010. www.authorsden.com/billpieper

Nora Pierce is the author of The Insufficiency of Maps, published by Atria/Simon & Schuster. The novel was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers title and shortlisted for the NCIBA Book of the Year award. She has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. She was a lecturer and Wallace Stegner fellow in Fiction at Stanford University and a PEN/Rosenthal fellow. She attended the Community of Writers in 2003. www.norapierce.com

Todd James Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Newsworld, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award and the Paterson Prize. His next book, Three Years in Wonderland, a narrative history of the men and women who built the first wave of American theme parks, was released in 2016. His work has been published in over 80 magazines and literary journals, including The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, The Sun, and Willow Springs. He attended the Community of Writers four times in the 1990s. www.toddjamespierce.com

Shira Potash, head of Sprouts Nutrition, is a certified nutritional educator. She teaches nutrition-based cooking classes to public elementary schoolchildren. She produced and directed the documentary film Food Stamped, which follows a couple as they attempt to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet on a food stamp budget. The film was an official selection for the Mill Valley Film Festival. She attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.foodstamped.com/film.html

Yoav Potash is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Crime After Crime, Yoav’s first full length feature documentary premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. The film has earned 15 honors including The National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award, five film festival audience awards, and the top two cash prizes for documentaries in the US. Crime After Crime was a Critics’ Pick in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Denver Post, among others. Yoav and the film have been featured on The PBS News Hour, MSNBC’s NewsNation, and numerous other TV and radio outlets. Food Stamped, a documentary Yoav co-produced and co-directed on a shoestring budget with his former wife Shira Potash, explores the challenge of eating healthy on a food stamp budget. This first-person film won the Grand Jury Prize at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, has been featured on CNN Money, and has found a wide audience across the US. His other past work includes Minute Matrimony, a Mel Brooks-style short comedy that earned a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Yoav has produced several other short films for PBS stations, and has produced, shot, and/or edited short films and advertisements for nonprofits and companies including Apple and Neutrogena. While attending college at UC Berkeley, he won several writing awards, including the Eisner Prize, the university’s top prize in creative writing. He attended the Community of Writers in 2005 and 2008. www.foodstamped.com/film.html

Ismet Prcic is a Bosnian American writer who is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for fiction in 2010. His debut novel Shards — which was published by Black Cat (Grove, Atlantic) in 2011 — won several awards including Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and Oregon Book Award. His work has been translated into nine languages. He is also a Sundance and a Jerusalem Screenwriting Lab fellow. He attended the Community of Writers in 2007, and has returned since on staff. www.ismetprcic.com

Zana Previti was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. Her work has been published in The New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO Poetry, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She was recently named the recipient of Poetry International’s 2014 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona. Her debut novel, The Chilling Simple, was published by Livingston Press in October, 2018. She attended the Community of Writers in 2012.

Paula Priamos is the author of the memoir The Shyster’s Daughter (Etruscan Press, 2012). Her newest novel, Inside V, was published by Rare Bird Books in April of 2017. Her writing has appeared inZYZZYVA, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and The Washington Post Magazine, among others. She attended the Community of Writers in 1997. www.paulapriamos.com

Frederick Reiken is the author of three novels. Day for Night, published in 2010 with Little, Brown & Co. Day for Night was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was cited as one of the best books of the year by theWashington Post and Kansas City Star. His debut novel, The Odd Sea, won the Hackney Literary Award and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. His second novel, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year for theLos Angeles Times. His novels have been published in 7 foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, and the Western Humanities Review, and his essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle. He is a member of the writing faculty at Emerson College. He attended the Community of Writers in 1992 and has since returned as a staff member. www.frederickreiken.com

Jon Riccio (’15, ’19) is a PhD graduate from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Recent work appears in Gris-Gris, Inverted Syntax, and The Ocean State Review, among others. A 2018 Lambda Poetry Fellow, he received his MFA from the University of Arizona. 

Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collections New Bad News (Sarabande Books), Hunters & Gamblers (Dark Sky Books), the poetry collection Ox (BatCat Press), as well as the chapbooks Hey, it’s America (Rust Belt Bindery) and 22nd Century Man (Sixth Finch Books). His novella, American Homes, was released in 2014 by Maize Books (Michigan Publishing). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tin House, McSweeney’s Small Chair, The Southern California Review, The Santa Monica Review, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart, Consequence Magazine, and elsewhere. A fiction editor at Juked Magazine, he writes and teaches in Southern California. He attended the Community of Writers in 2010.

Robin Romm is the author of three books, a chapbook, and numerous articles and book reviews. Most recently, she edited Double Bind: Women on Ambition (Liveright 2017) which collects personal essays from thinkers like Roxane Gay, Sarah Ruhl, Elisa Albert, Theresa Rebeck, Molly Ringwald, and Julie Holland, in order to understand the complicated issue of female striving. Her story collection, The Mother Garden, was a finalist for the PEN USA prize. Her memoir, The Mercy Papers, was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner, Don Waters, and teaches in the low-residency MFA program in writing at Warren Wilson. She attended the Community of Writers in 2003. www.robinromm.com

Robert Rorke was born and raised and lives in Brooklyn. He is a TV editor at the New York Post who has also previously written for Publishers Weekly, TV Guide, Los Angeles Times, and Seventeen. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his MA in English from Stanford University. Car Trouble, his debut novel, was published in September, 2018, by HarperCollins. He attended the Community of Writers in 2011.

Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum is the author of the novel, A Day of Small Beginnings (Little, Brown & Co., 2006), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is a writer and dramaturge for Jewish Women’s Theatre in Los Angeles, which presents original, themed performance pieces for at-home salons and in venues across the country. She is also completing her next novel King of Cahokia, about the destruction of ancient Indian mounds at Cahokia, Illinois, the Blacklist, America’s interstate highways, and oh yes, love. Lisa lives in Pacific Palisades, California. She attended the Community of Writers in 2001. www.lisapearlrosenbaum.com

Amy Kathleen Ryan is the author of six young adult novels, most notably Vibes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) and her science fiction novels Glow, Spark, and Flame, collectively The Sky Chasers series, (St. Martins, 2011), which has been published in more than a dozen languages and was optioned for film rights by 20th Century Fox. She graduated from the New School MFA program in creative writing, and lives in Colorado with her husband and three daughters. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006. www.amykathleenryan.com

Kris Saknussem’s first collection of poems IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER was published by The False Frontier Press in Melbourne and London in 1988 and won the Mary Gilmore Award from ASAL (the Association for the Study of Australian Literature). ZANESVILLE, his first novel was published to critical acclaim by the Villard Books imprint of Random House in 2005, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and released in hardcover in Russia. His other published books include ENIGMATIC PILOT from Ballantine-Del Rey, SINISTER MINIATURES, a collection of short stories from Lazy Fascist Press, a portfolio book of art THE COLORS OF COMPULSION from Les Editions du Zaporogue…REVEREND AMERICA (Dark Coast Press), EAT JELLIED EELS AND THINK DISTANT THOUGHTS (PS Publishing) and SEA MONKEYS, A Memory Book (Soft Skull Press). Forthcoming work includes a play, THE HUMBLE ASSESSMENT, from Lazy Fascist Press, another portfolio book of visual art from Les Editions du Zaporogue called POSSIBLE LANGUAGES, a collaboration of text and image with the French photographer Esther Voisin entitled INTIME, and several new works of both fiction and nonfiction. www.krissaknussemm.com

Lucy Sanna is author of the novel The Cherry Harvest (William Morrow/HarperCollins, June 2015). Previous publications include a self-help relationship set (Random House), translated into eight languages. Lucy has published poetry and erotic stories in literary magazines and has been featured on national television and radio, including CBS, NBC, NPR, and FOX, as well as in national press such as Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, and Playboy Magazine. Since 1999, Lucy has served on the Executive Planning Committee for the National Kidney Foundation’s annual San Francisco Authors Luncheon. While working on her next novel, Lucy leads creative writing workshops. Born and raised in Wisconsin, Lucy divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.lucysanna.com

Eric Sasson is the author of the short story collection Margins of Tolerance (Livingston Press, 2012) and the forthcoming novel, Admissions. His stories have been nominated for the Robert Olen Butler prize, the Pushcart prize, and one is in The Best Gay Stories 2013. For three years, he wrote “Ctrl-Alt,” a column on LGBT culture for the Wall Street Journal, and he is now a regular contributor to The New Republic and GOOD magazine. His political articles have been featured on “Meet the Press” and “Morning Joe,” and his December 2016 article “Turning Fury into Fuel” for GOOD magazine just won a National Magazine Award “Ellie” for Personal Service. Other publication credits include pieces in Salon, Five Points, William and Mary Review, The Puritan, BLOOM and Nashville Review,among others. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and is the recipient of fellowships to several residencies, including Ragdale, VCCA, Hambidge, Anderson Center and I-Park, among others. He received his MA in Creative Writing from NYU and has taught fiction writing in Brooklyn, where he was born, bred, and still resides. www.ericsassonnow.com

Helen Sedwick is the author of the historical novel Coyote Winds, published by Ten Gallon Press in 2013. A practicing lawyer as well as a writer, her non-fiction book Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook was released in 2014, along with the companion ebooks, How to Use Eye-Catching Images Without Paying a Fortune or a Lawyer and How to Use Memorable Lyrics Without Paying a Fortune or a Lawyer. In 2016, she co-authored How Authors Sell Publishing Rights with Orna Ross. She attended the Community of Writers in 2009 and 2012. www.helensedwick.com

Benton Sen is the author of Men of Hula, about the only male halau hula (school) in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts writing fellowship, the James D. Houston Fellowship from the Squaw Valley Writers Conference, and he has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists. Benton earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and attended the Community of Writers in 2010 and 2011. He lives in Honolulu.

Adrienne Sharp is the author of White Swan, Black Swan(Random House, 2001), The Sleeping Beauty (Riverhead, 2005), The True Memoirs of Little K (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), and the forthcoming The Magnificent Esme Wells (HarperCollins, 2018). She attended the Community of Writers in 1988 and again in 1998. www.adriennesharp.com

Dashka Slater is the recipient of a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, The Wishing Box (Chronicle, 2000), was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. She is also an award-winning journalist who writes for the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Salon, Mother Jones, Sierra and many other publications, as well as the author of four children’s books: Baby Shoes (Bloomsbury, 2006); Firefighters in the Dark (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); The Sea Serpent and Me (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) and Dangerously Ever After (Dial, 2012). Dangerously Ever After is currently being made into a stop-motion film by Fantasiation Studios. Three more of Dashka’s books will be released in 2017: The Antlered Ship (Beach Lane), Escargot (FSG), and The 57 Bus (FSG). The latter is Young Adult title based on Slater’s New York Times Magazine piece about two teenagers on either side of an alleged hate crime. She attended the Community of Writers in 2005.  www.dashkaslater.com

Scott Sparling‘s novel, Wire to Wire, was published by Tin House Books in 2011 and received the Michigan Notable Book Award. A graduate of Antioch College, he lives outside Portland, Oregon. He attended the Community of Writers in 1986 and 1992. scottsparling.net

Nancy Spiller is a Los Angeles based writer, artist and instructor with UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. She was a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News, its Sunday magazine, West, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and editor of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate’s Entertainment News Service. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, Mother Jones, Town & Country, USA Weekend, McCall’s, Cooking Light and Salon.com. Her books include Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes) (Counterpoint, 2009) and the illustrated memoir Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box (Counterpoint, 2013). She attended Squaw Valley’s Art of the Wild in 1993.  www.nancyspiller.org

Janyce Stefan-Cole‘s debut novel, Hollywood Boulevard (Unbridled Books), is now a New York Public Library Trending E-Book. Her second novel, The Detective’s Garden, was released from Unbridled Books in 2016. Janyce is a contributing editor to The WG, and was Book Editor for FreeWilliamsburg for five years. Janyce’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Knock Literary Magazine (Eco-lit Prize winner), And Then, and Ducts, as well as in the anthologies Being Human: Call of the Wild, The Healing Muse and the Boston Globe bestselling Dick for a Day (Villard Books/Random House). Four time fellow of the Virginia Center for The Creative Arts and a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, Janyce attended the Community of Writers in 2004. www.janycestefan-cole.com

Brad Summerhill is a writer and professor of English at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno. He is the author of a novel, Gambler’s Quartet (Virginia Avenue Press, 2010). His short fiction has appeared in South Dakota Review, Red Rock Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Aethlon, Reno News & Review and elsewhere. His work has received support from the Arkansas Arts Council and the Nevada Arts Council.

Christine Sunderland is the author of the novels Pilgrimage (2007), Offerings (2009) which won a bronze medal in the IPPY 2010 Awards (Independent Publishers Association), Inheritance (2009), Hana-lani (2010) which won Honorable Mentions in the San Francisco Book Festival, the Hollywood Book Festival, and the Beach Book Festival, and The Fire Trail (2016).  www.ChristineSunderland.com

Ellen Sussman is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels: A Wedding in Provence, The Paradise Guest House, French Lessons and On a Night Like This. She is also the editor of two anthologies: Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave. She teaches writing through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes out of her home. Ellen attended the Community of Writers in 1980 and 1996 and was a member of the teaching staff in 2014.  www.ellensussman.com

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest, which has been translated into more than 25 languages and optioned for film by Amazon Studios with Sweeney writing the adaptation. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. She attended the Community of Writers in 2013.

A. R. Taylor has published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes, the Vonnegut Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud, among others. After winning a Writers Foundation of America award in Comedy for her play Up The Nile, Taylor appeared at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York and Tongue & Groove in Hollywood. In addition, she was head writer on two Emmy winning series for public television. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion appeared in 2014 and won a gold medal for Best Regional Fiction at the IPPY Awards, also named a finalist in the USA Best Book Awards. She attended the Community of Writers in 2011.

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from UC Irvine. He is the author of five books including Understanding This that won the New Voice’s Award, and the bestselling Dead Above Ground which won PEN Oakland’s Award for Multicultural writing. Honors include: Remsen Bird Writer in Residence at Occidental college and a Disney Writing Fellow; Discover New Writers 1994; Honorable Mention, Pushcart Prize, 1996; Gold Crown Award from Pasadena Arts Council, 1994; California Arts Fellowship, 2003. NEA Panelist for Small Presses, 2006; LA Press Club Awards: Signed Commentary, 1st Place for “The Slow Death of a Chocolate City.” He teaches at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara and is the director of the Literature for Life Project; a literary/salon magazine; and is the literary director of LitFest Pasa dena. His newest novel, Monster’s Chef was published by Amistad Books at Harper Collins in June, 2014.

Renee Thompson’s stories have appeared in Crossborder, Narrative, Literal Latte, Arcadia, and elsewhere. She has placed as a finalist in competitions sponsored by Narrative, Literal Latte, Glimmer Train, and Writer’s Digest, and is the author of two novels, The Plume Hunter (Torrey House Press, 2011) and The Bridge at Valentine (Tres Picos Press, 2010), which was selected as the 2014 Community Book for Woodland Reads. Currently, she is working on a contemporary novel. Renee attended the Community of Writers in 2003, 2007, and 2009. www.reneethompson.com

Melanie Thorne is the author of the semi-autobiographical novel Hand Me Down (Dutton/Plume), which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2012 and a 2013 ALA Alex Award nominee. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from the University of CA, Davis, and has been awarded the Alva Englund Fellowship, the Maurice Prize in Fiction, and a residency at the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat. She was a 2014 Virginia Quarterly Review Nonfiction Scholar and a 2014 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices mentor. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. She attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.melaniethorne.com

Wendy Nelson Tokunaga is an award-winning writer, independent editor for novels and memoirs, writing teacher and acclaimed cat servant. Her novels include Midori by Moonlight, Love in Translation, Falling Uphill, His Wife and Daughters and No Kidding. Her non-fiction title is Marriage in Translation: Foreign Wife, Japanese Husband. She received her MFA from University of San Francisco and teaches for Stanford’s Certificate Program in Novel Writing. Her latest book is the first in a series of short story collections called Postcards From Tokyo.  She attended the Community of Writers in 2001 and 2002. www.wendytokunaga.com

Julia Park Tracey (’16, ’18) is the author of three novels: Tongues of Angels, Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop, and Veronika Layne Has a Nose for News; two collections of women’s history (I’ve Got Some Lovin’ to Do: The Diary of a Roaring Twenties Teen, and Reaching for the Moon: More Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen), and a volume of poetry, Amaryllis: Collected Poems (Scarlet Letter Press, 2nd ed. 2021). She was selected as Poet Laureate for the city of Alameda, California, in 2014-2017. Julia has written for Huffington Post, Salon, Paste, Scary Mommy, Thrillist, Redbook, Narratively, Oakland Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Insight, and many other publications in print and online. The Bereaved, forthcoming in August 2023, tells of her third great-grandmother Martha, a poor widow, and the choices she made to survive with four hungry children as the Civil War erupted around her. Forthcoming in Fall 2024, Silence, tells of Julia’s eighth great-grandmother, Silence Greenleaf, who was punished by the Puritan Church in coastal Massachusetts,  1722, and spent a year in silence to fit her name. 

Carla Trujillo is the editor of two anthologies, Living Chicana Theory (Third Woman Press), and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Third Woman Press), winner of a Lambda Book Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award. Her first novel, What Night Brings (Curbstone Press 2003), won the Miguel Marmol prize focusing on human rights. What Night Brings also won the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Latino Literary Foundation Book Award, Bronze Medal from Foreword Magazine, Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Meyers Books Award, and was a LAMBDA Book Award finalist. Her latest novel, Faith and Fat Chances (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press 2015), was a finalist for the PEN-Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She attended the Community of Writers in ’04 and ’05. www.carlatrujillo.net

Jessica Maria Tuccelli is a writer, adventure traveler, and performer. The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance named her debut novel, Glow (Penguin 2013), an Okra Pick—their highest recognition. Glow is now in its sixth printing and was long-listed for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. In 2014, she was awarded a residency at Château de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence, and is currently working on her second novel. Tuccelli attended the Community of Writers in 2008. www.jessicamariatuccelli.com 

Lisa Tucker is the author of six novels: The Song Reader, Shout Down the Moon, Once Upon a Day, The Cure for Modern Life, The Promised World and The Winters in Bloom. Her books have been published in fourteen countries and selected for Borders Original Voices, Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, People Magazine Critic’s Choice, Redbook Book Club, Amazon Book of the Year, Barnes & Noble Reading Group program, Target “Breakout” Books, the American Library Association Popular Paperbacks, and the Indie Next list. Her short work has appeared in The New York Times, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. She attended the Community of Writers in 2001. www.lisatucker.com

Brenda Rickman Vantrease’s first novel The Illuminator, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2005, and was translated into fourteen foreign languages and became a national best-seller. Her second novel, The Mercy Seller, was published by St. Martin’s Press in hardcover in 2007. Her newest novel, The Heretic’s Wife, was published by St. Martin’s in 2010. She attended the Community of Writers in 2002. www.brendarickmanvantrease.com

Katherine Vaz is the author of two novels, Saudade and Mariana, as well as three short story collections, Fado & Other Stories, Our Lady of the Artichokes & Other Portuguese-American Stories, and most recently, The Love Life of an Assistant Animator & Other Stories Paperback. Once designated a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer, her work has appeared in six languages and has received numerous accolades, including the Library of Congress’ Top Thirty International Books of 1998, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Award. Her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies by Viking, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. She attended the Community of Writers in 1988. www.katherinevaz.com

Monona Wali is an award winning author – her novel My Blue Skin Lover won the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Award for multi-cultural fiction. Her stories have been published in The Santa Monica Review, Stone Canoe, Tiferet, Catamaran and other literary journals. She was the winner of the 2011 Wordstock Short Story Contest judged by Aimee Bender. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing and literature at Santa Monica College and Antioch University and volunteers with InsideOut Writers, an organization that offers writing classes for incarcerated youth. She attended the Community of Writers in 2004. www.mononawali.com

Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of the novels Sleep Toward Heaven, How to be Lost, Forgive Me, Close Your Eyes, The Same Sky, and the short story collection Love Stories in this Town. Her work has been optioned for film and television and published in fifteen countries. Her newest novel, The Nearness of You, was published by Ballantine in early 2017. She attended the Community of Writers in 1992. www.amandaward.com

Spring M. Warren is the author of Turpentine: A Novel, published by Grove/Atlantic. Her second book, Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year, was published by Seal Press in 2011. thequarteracrefarm.com

Tim Wendel is the author of thirteen books and a writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University. His titles include the Summer of ’68, which was named a notable book by the state of Michigan, High Heat, which was an Editor’s Choice of The New York Times Book Review, and most recently, Night on Manitou Island (SunBear Press). Tim is also the author of several works of fiction, including Castro’s Curveball, Red Rain and Habana Libre. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, American Scholar, The Potomac Review, Gargoyle, GQ and Esquire. He attended the Community of Writers 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 2005. www.timwendel.com

Waimea Williams is the author of Aloha, Mozart (Luminis Books), which won the 2013 Excellence Award from the Hawaii Publishers Assn. for a novel about Hawaii published outside the islands. The 2014 edition of Crab Orchard Review (The West Coast and Beyond) features her essay “Sacred Valley, Modern Times.” In 2012 she won The Chariton Review’s first prize for a short story; an essay about her home island of Kauai appeared in Cirque, and Island Heritage published her book on cultural practices, Aloha for the Heart and Soul. She is also the author of a memoir about growing up in the Territory of Hawaii. Waimea Williams first attended Squaw Valley in 1989 and returned often, more recently on the staff. She passed away in March of 2015.

Mark Wisniewski, winner of a Pushcart Prize, is the author of Watch Me Go (January, 2015). Watch Me Go was sold at auction to Penguin Putnam and has been praised by Salman Rushdie, Daniel Woodrell, Rebecca Makkai, Christine Sneed, and Dan Chaon. Wisniewski’s first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, praised by the Los Angeles Times, sold out two printings. More than 100 of his short stories have been published in print magazines such as Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and The Sun, and hundreds of his narrative poems have appeared in print venues such as The Iowa Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry. He attended the Community of Writers in 1991. www.markwisniewski.net

Diane Wolff is an expert on East Asia and the recipient of an ALA Notable Book Award. She has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chicago Tribune, among others, for her work on China and Tibet. Palgrave MacMillan published her book of nonfiction, Tibet Unconquered: An Epic Struggle for Freedom, in late 2010, with a foreword by Robert Thurman, the foremost expert on Tibetan Buddhism in the U.S. www.dianewolff.com

Mingmei Yip is a musician, writer, poet, artist, and calligrapher who has written nine books. Her most recent novels include The Nine Fold Heaven, Secret of a Thousand Beauties, The Witches Market, and Memoirs of a Courtesan. Her second children’s book Grandma Panda’s China Storybook which she both wrote and illustrated, was published in 2013. Her other novels (all published by Kensington Books) are: Skeleton Women (Femmes Fatales, 2012), Song of the Silk Road (2011), Petals from the Sky (2010), and Peach Blossom Pavilion (2008). Mingmei’s novels have been translated into nine languages so far. www.mingmeiyip.com

Alia Yunis, a filmmaker, screenwriter, author and journalist, is currently directing and producing the feature length documentary, The Golden Harvest. A PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, Alia is the author of the novel The Night Counter (Crown/Random House, 2010), which has been critically acclaimed by the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly and several other publications. It was chosen as a top summer read by the Chicago Tribune and Boston Phoenix. Alia has worked as a filmmaker and journalist in several cities.  Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Aramco World, and Saveur, among others.  Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in numerous anthologies.  She began her career in film after winning an award for comedy writing from Warner Bros when she was studying at American University in Washington, DC. She attended the Community of Writers in 2004.  goldenharvestfilm.org

Her most recent book, Forget I Told You This will be published September 1, 2023 By University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of the award-winning Paper is White. Her short works have appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One, Southwest Review, and Utne Reader, and have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Photo by Mo Saito

Alexi Zentner is the author of the novels The Lobster Kings and Touch. Touch was shortlisted for The Governor General’s Literary Award, The Center for Fiction’s Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Alexi’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and many other publications. Alexi is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University and a faculty member in the Sierra Nevada College low residency MFA program. He attended the Community of Writers in 2005. www.alexizentner.com

John Hiller Zobel (’06) was an author, recovering attorney, and accomplished athlete. John practiced law for twenty years in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer and parent in 2007. His first book, A Slight Change of Plans, published in 1998, was a P.G. Wodehouse-style romantic comedy. He earned a B.A. in English from Harvard College in 1981 and received his law degree from Stanford Law School in 1985. He died unexpectedly on the summit of Aconcagua in Argentina in January 2017. In 2023, the U.S. Naval Institute Press published his biography, Eugene Fly, Pioneer of Naval Aviation, posthumously.