Our Writers
Alison Bing is a culture commentator, food writer, art critic, editor, and content maven. Alison's writing credits cover dozens of titles for Lonely Planet and parent company BBC, pop culture and art books for Barnes & Noble and Chronicle Books, news media from San Francisco Chronicle to The Guardian (UK), culture magazines such as Cooking Light, BlackBook, Architectural Record, and Flash Art, and commentary for NPR, NBC, and PBS. She also consults on content for leaders in media, technology, and consumer goods, including Proctor & Gamble, Blurb, NBCi/Universal, TransFair USA, American Documentary Inc., LeapFrog, Telemundo, and FRONTLINE/World. Follow Alison on Twitter: @AlisonBing.
Jeanne Carstensen is a San Francisco-based independent journalist. Since 2015 she has covered the refugee crisis in Europe for PRI’s The World, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Global Post and other outlets with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Jeanne was executive managing editor of The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. She has was managing editor of Salon and an editor at SFGate.com and the Whole Earth Review and a producer at Radio for Peace International, a shortwave station in Costa Rica, where she lived for six years. She was a National Arts Journalism fellow at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, Salon, Religion Dispatches, Al Jazeera America, and other outlets. Read more at www. jeannecarstensen.net. Follow Jeanne on Twitter: @jcarstensen.
Vanessa Chang is a writer, scholar, curator and educator who builds communities and conversations about our virtual and physical encounters with new media and technology. She works with artists, dancers, scholars, technologists, coders and musicians to understand how we might live and move in a technologically mediated world with grace, responsibility, and a sense of play. She also writes about comics, circuses, street art, hip-hop, and disability, and has published essays in Popular Music, Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, American Music, Journal of Visual Culture, and in media res. With roots in Singapore and Australia, she has wandered widely and seems to be planting new ones in San Francisco. http://www.vanessa-chang.com
Spencer Fleury has worked as a sailor, copywriter, economics professor and record store clerk, among other disreputable professions. He was born in the Detroit suburbs, spent most of his life in Florida, and now lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Ascent, Blunderbuss, The Collapsar and Utne Reader, among others, and his first novel, How I’m Spending My Afterlife, was published in October 2017. He has recently completed a story collection and is now working on a novel set aboard a Coast Guard cutter in the mid-1990s. Learn more at www.SpencerFleury.com.
Susie Hara is the author of the novel Finder of Lost Objects, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and winner of a 2015 International Latino Book Award. Her performance works and plays have appeared at the Marsh and Z Space, and her play Lost and Found in the Mission, written with Rowena Richie, received a Best of Fringe award in the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival. When she’s not editing publications at her day job, she’s teaching at the Writing Salon, reading fiction, or doing zumba. Read more at susiehara.net
Scott James is a veteran journalist, best known for reporting about San Francisco and other articles for The New York Times. He is the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, winner of the ★2021 top prize for contemporary nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards. Trial by Fire (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books, 2020) tells the story of The Station nightclub fire, one of America's deadliest criminal cases. James also writes fiction under the pen name Kemble Scott, and is the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, finalist for the national Lambda literary prize for debut fiction. Scott has three Emmy Awards for his work in television news and is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Read more at ScottJamesWriter.com. Follow Scott on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.
Mercilee Jenkins writes plays poetry and short fiction. She is a winner of Poets 11, the citywide poetry contest in San Francisco for 2015 and three of her poems are published in the anthology of the same name. Last year, she presented her poetry at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl and the Basement Series sponsored by the Writers Grotto. Her ten-minute plays, Winning and 50 Love Letters, were winners in the Redwood Writers Play Contest and presented at their Annual Play Festival in Santa Rosa, CA. Actors Theatre of Santa Cruz, CA also selected Winning for production in their 2015 Festival. Her full-length play, Spirit of Detroit, was produced in Detroit at The Wright Museum of African American History in 2014 and premiered at the University of Michigan in 2013. Excerpts of her latest play, The House on Norfolk Road, were performed at Stage Werx and CounterPulse and the entire play will have a stage reading this summer at the Mill Valley Public Library. Her short story, “The Day Mel Tormé Died” was published in the anthology, Sisters Born, Sisters Found, which was just selected as the winner in the Women's Issues category of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Shana Mahaffey is the author of Sounds Like Crazy (NAL/Penguin), a San Francisco Chronicle notable book for Fall 2009. She is a survivor of catechism and cat scratch fever and is a co-founder of the Castro Writers' Cooperative. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sunset Magazine, SoMa Literary Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Reflections Literary Journal, and assorted literary blogs. Shana lives in San Francisco with her husband and two tuxedo cats that require reverence and worship akin to the level proffered by the ancient Egyptians. Read more at www.shanamahaffey.com.
Tina LeCount Myers is a writer, surfer, and gluestick artist. Born in Mexico to expat-bohemian parents, she grew up on Southern California tennis courts with a prophecy hanging over her head; her parents hoped she’d one day be an author. Tina is the author of The Legacy of the Heavens trilogy: The Song of All, Dreams of the Dark Sky, and Breath of Gods. Her work has also appeared in Literary Hub and Tor.com. Tina lives with her adventurer husband and demanding Siamese cat. www.tinalecountmyers.com
Jessica Raya’s latest novel, Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit, was one of iPad Books’ Summer's Most Anticipated in 2017. Her first novel, The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club, published in four languages under a pseudonym, was a Redbook Top 10 Summer Read and a Kirkus Best Books of 2007. Her writing has appeared in magazines and literary journals, as well as the 2010 essay collection What My Father Gave Me: Daughters Speak.
Natacha Ruck is a writer, filmmaker, journalist, podcaster and translator -- basically she's all over the place. Her documentary work has appeared at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as on National Geographic, WNBC NY, and Link TV. Her memoir and podcasting work has aired on NPR affiliates nationally. Humanoids, Image and D.C. Comics have published her translations of French graphic novels. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at USF and is working on a graphic novel and a memoir/cookbook/songbook and travel guide: "Nothing a Dash of Liquor Can't Fix."
Melina Selverston Scher is the author of a historical novel, For You and All of Us, based on the biblical legend of Judith and Holofernes. She is currently writing coming of age novel, drawing from experience, about a young woman who challenges an oil company in the Amazon rainforest. She published a well-received textbook called Ethnopolitics in Ecuador, and numerous articles in the field of Latin American politics, human rights and the environment. She blogs at www.MelinaSelverston.com and performs with Parlor Tricks www.ParlorTricksMusic.com.
Wendy M. Voorsanger is the author of the novel Prospects of a Woman (She Writes Press 2020). Wendy started her career in the Silicon Valley writing about technology trends and innovations for newspapers, magazines, and Fortune 100 companies. She is the author of the yet-to-be-published historical novel, Prospects of a Woman, and is the editor of SheisCalifornia, a blog chronicling women throughout history who helped build California. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in Journalism from California Polytechnic State University. Read more at https://wendyvoorsanger.net.
Our Alumni
Galadrielle Allman was born in Macon, Georgia in 1969, the same place and time as her family's legendary band, the Allman Brothers Band. Her father, Duane Allman, is considered one of the greatest Rock guitarists of all time. Galadrielle was raised primarily in Berkeley, California, where she still lives happily. She studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College, always hoping to tell her family's story. On the eve of her 40th birthday, she began to write her first book: Please Be With Me, A Song for My Father Duane Allman. It was published by Spiegel & Grau in March, 2014 and was chosen by Amazon as a best book of 2014 in two categories: Memoir and Entertainment. She is currently working on a novel that continues to mine the subjects of family, identity and music.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of five novels, including You Killed Wesley Payne and The Infects. His latest is the punk rock opus Wise Young Fool. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Al-Jazeera America. A forthcoming short story collection is due from Algonquin Press in Spring '16. He is also a founding editor of the arts and culture site The Weeklings. (@seanbeaudoin, seanbeaudoin.com, theweeklings.com).
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015) a book-length lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma. Other writing has appeared in publications including Bitch, McSweeney's, 580 Split, and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. Her work has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, This Will Take Time, and Small Press Traffic. Berkowitz is the host of the Amy's Kitchen Organics reading series, the coordinator of the Alley Cat Books writing residency, and the founding editor of Mondo Bummer Books, an experimental small press. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s working on her second book. More at amyberko.com.
Adrienne Bitar is the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization, the first cultural history and analysis of American diet books. Published in 2018, the book analyzes how the obesity epidemic and diet book narratives reflect and shape broad cultural, religious, historical, and moral meaning. Other food research has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Gastronomica, Utopian Studies, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Buzzfeed, Bon Appetit, and The Conversation.
Karen Bjorneby is the author of Hurricane Season, recipient of Foreword’s Honorable Mention as best independent/university press short story collection. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in such places as The Threepenny Review, New Letters, The Sun, North American Review, StoryQuarterly, New Orleans Review, Confrontation, Poetry Daily, and Zocalo Public Square. She’s received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, a Pushcart Special Mention citation, two other Pushcart nominations, and a National Magazine Award nomination. As a freelance editor/instructor, she's guided clients/students through work that has received, among others, a Lambda Literary Award nomination, a Tobias Wolff Award finalist position, and the Iron Horse Essay Award. She’s currently completing her first novel, Naked, Shining, and Alive. www.karenbjorneby.com
Melodie Bowsher is the author of My Lost and Found Life. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Melodie has worked as a freelance business writer in various forms. She is the mother of two, whose crisis-filled teenage years provided fodder for her first novel.
Katie Burke is the author of Urban Playground, a book of profiles featuring San Francisco kids ages five to nine, (SparkPress, 2020). She writes Noe Kids, a monthly column for The Noe Valley Voice, featuring kids ages four to thirteen who live in Noe Valley. Katie has taught creative writing to children and adults in Kenya, South Africa, and San Francisco, and has facilitated workshops with incarcerated journalists at San Quentin through the Society of Professional Journalists. Katie has traveled frequently to New Orleans, and her writing expresses her appreciation for San Francisco's and New Orleans’ eccentric characters. Also a family law attorney, Katie writes judicial and attorney profiles for San Francisco Attorney Magazine. Her writing has appeared in a HarperCollins collection, in the L.A. Times, and on KQED Perspectives. Learn more at www.katieburkeauthor.com.
Michael Chorost is a freelance writer, contributor to Wired and Technology Review, and author of two books: Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (which won the PEN/USA award for Creative Nonfiction in 2006), and World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Human and Machine (The Free Press, Oct. 2010). In 2007 he scriptwrote a PBS show, The 22nd Century. Mike focuses on how technology is changing communication and the body. In July 2008 he moved temporarily to Washington D.C. to be a visiting professor at Gallaudet University, and in August 2009 decided to stay in D.C. permanently (having met his wife) while continuing to work as a freelancer. Although now an alumnus, he calls his home office The Sanchez Grotto Annex, East Coast Branch. He keeps a blog at www.michaelchorost.com.
Joshua Citrak is the creator of slouch magazine, and his work has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, Air In the Paragraph Line, SoMa Literary Review, Instant City and a whole bunch of others that he can't remember at the moment. He is currently at work on his first best seller. Follow Josh on Twitter: @JoshuaCitrak.
Andrea Coombes pays the bills by writing about personal finance for the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Consumers Digest and others. She ghost-wrote a book about entrepreneurship and was the revising author on a book on consumer credit reports. She likes to believe that writing about retirement savings and other money topics is helping someone, somewhere, but she gets grouchy when people want to talk hot stocks, investing in gold or the imminent collapse of the monetary system. Coombes is working on a memoir about her elegantly outlandish mother, an Austrian immigrant whose penchant for drinking, smoking and fast driving eventually led her to self-destruct. Coombes also writes personal essays; here’s her favorite. Follow her on Twitter: @andreacoombes
Yalitza Ferreras is a 2014-2015 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where she won the Delbanco Thesis Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Daring to Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women.
Michelle Gagnon is a former modern dancer, bartender, dog walker, model, personal trainer, and Russian supper club performer. Her IMBA bestselling novels have been published in North America, France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Australia. Her debut thriller THE TUNNELS (June 2007) involves a series of ritualized murders in the abandoned tunnel system beneath a university. BONEYARD (July 2008) depicts a cat and mouse game between dueling serial killers and was described by the Chicago Tribune as, "utterly gripping...an addictively readable thriller." THE GATEKEEPER (November 2009) concerns a domestic terror plot by anti-immigration hate groups. Michelle is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. In her spare time she runs errands and indulges a weakness for Scrabble, stale cinema popcorn, and Hollywood blockbusters. Read more at www.michellegagnon.com.
Laura Goode is the author of a collection of poems, Become a Name (Fathom Books, 2016), and a novel for young adults, Sister Mischief (Candlewick Press, 2011). She wrote (with director Meera Menon) and produced the feature film Farah Goes Bang; FGB premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and won the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue. Her nonfiction has appeared in BuzzFeed, Longreads, ELLE, Refinery29, New Republic, New York Magazine, Fusion, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Bright Ideas, where she is a contributing editor. She received her BA and MFA from Columbia University and lives in San Francisco. lauragoode.com // @lauragoode // tinyletter.com/lauragoode
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the librettist of Unfinished: An Opera, a new work about the death and life of a women’s college, currently in development with composer Joshua Groffman and producer Vital Opera. Unfinished debuted in summer 2016 at sold-out engagements in Sarah’s native Hudson River Valley and at the National Opera Center in New York City, where it returned in October 2018. Sarah is also the author of Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award, and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress collaboration with book artist Leah Virsik. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a finalist for the 2017 National Poetry Series. Sarah works in fundraising at the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and social justice and is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two contemporary YA novels, Enter Title Here and We Are Totally Normal (HarperTeen, ’20). Additionally, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF Lightspeed, The Indiana Review, and Nature. She’s currently working on her first novel for adults. If you want to know more you can visit er blog at The War on Loneliness.
Evan Karp is a seeker of fortune in the form of trite interior monologue. He started and runs Quiet Lightning and Litseen and a life-full of other projects you'd probably respect, if not love, and of which you could almost certainly be a part. Visit otherpeople.info to question all your burning answers.
Mike Karpa is a San Francisco writer whose short fiction has appeared in Tin House (forthcoming), Sixfold, Faultline and other literary magazines, as have selections from Between Countries, an unpublished novel rooted in his early years in Bombay. Also a translator, he has translated Bai Xian-yung (from Chinese) and million-selling author Taichi Sakaiya (from Japanese) and written about translation for national and international publications. A sometime visiting professor of Japanese translation at the Monterey Institute, he has served as a staff translator at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in criminal investigations and is currently editing Criminals, his novel of hapless drug smugglers in 1990s Tokyo, for the final time. Again. www.mikekarpa.com
Ammi Keller is the publisher of the the zine "Emergency" since 1998. A Wallace Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford for 2008-2009, Ammi is at work on a novel-in-stories about gender, race, disaster capitalism and Hurricane Katrina, one of which was a Most Read Story of the Year at Joyland. Another of her her stories appears in the Fall 2014 issue of American Short Fiction. Ammi teaches in the Certificate Program in Novel Writing at Stanford University.
Jeff Kirschner is the father of two ridiculous kids, storyteller, and founder of Litterati.
Lee Daniel Kravetz is a veteran writer and author of author of the books Strange Contagions: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves and Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering & Success. He has written for print and television, including The New York Times, Psychology Today, and The San Francisco Chronicle, as well as Frontline, NOVA, and Sesame Street. He is a founding board member of the Lit Camp Writers Conference, which produces the Basement Reading Series. For more information, visit www.leedanielkravetz.com
Nick Krieger is the author of the memoir, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender (Beacon Press, 2011), winner of a Stonewall Honor Book Award and an Independent Literary Award. His writing has also earned several travel-writing awards and has been published in multiple travel guides. In 2013, he received a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. He's currently working on a book weaving together his spiritual path and transgender experience, also known as a queer yoga memoir. When he's not at his day job, Nick teaches writing seminars, leads yoga classes & workshops, and speaks at universities around the country. He holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Kathryn Lefroy is an Australian born writer now residing in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in many art/culture, technology and academic publications, and her screenwriting has twice been shortlisted for Screen Australia awards. In 2010 she completed her PhD in business, and prior to relocating to the US she was a professor at one of Australia's top universities. She's currently working on two novels--a rollicking MG adventure and an erotic chick-lit. When she's not writing she's playing the ukulele (badly).
Paul Linde a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, is author of the nonfiction book Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist, published by the University of California Press in January 2010. He's worked in the San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Service, where he teaches psychiatric residents, interns, medical students, and nursing students, since 1992. His writing has been compared to that of Alexander Luria, Oliver Sacks, and Sherwin Nuland. His first book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2002. Linde has also contributed to the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and JAMA. He's written animation screenplays and also created, produced, and hosted a weekly health program on KALW Radio in San Francisco.
Jenelle Lindsay is Film and Television EVP for Unanimous Media. As a television writer she wrote for the Teen Nickelodeon drama South of Nowhere as well as soap operas Guiding Light, The Young and The Restless and Port Charles. She also worked as a television executive for Sony Pictures Television, Katalyst Media and Endemol USA. She continues to work in non-fiction as well, producing several documentaries, with the focus now on Soufra, an inspiring story about a refugee food truck. And when she needs an outlet, she writes humorous pieces - from a Teen Trump satire series to anti-parenting advice - on Medium: https://medium.com/@julindsay
Jennifer Lou has authored several thousand emails and instant messages, most of which were penned while working at Google and then at AdMob, which was then acquired by Google. She has published a short story in the anthology Breakfast from Mars and is the co-editor of Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All written by the Rock Bottom Remainders. She serves on the Board of Youth Speaks and has a BA in English Literature from Columbia University. She misses the otter rodeo at Monterey Bay Aquarium and looks forward to volunteering there again one day.
Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow, 2013) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008), favorably reviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books and American Book Review, among other places. Her poetry and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Coconut, DIAGRAM,Berfrois, Conversations at the Wartime Café, HuffPost Impact, Writerland, and elsewhere.
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the novel, Mary, (Harcourt), and the memoir, The Russian Word for Snow, (St. Martin's Press). Her new novel, A Master Plan for Rescue, is forthcoming from Riverhead in Summer 2015. Her travel stories have appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the founder of the Lit Camp writers conference and The Basement Series, a literary reading series.
John Pacheco is at work on his first novel. He lives in the Castro and has organized the weekly Shut Up and Write! event at Borderlands Cafe.
Susanne Pari is an Iranian-American novelist, book reviewer, and essayist. Her novel, The Fortune Catcher, tells the story of a young woman—American and Iranian, Jewish and Muslim—caught in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Susanne writes and speaks on issues of American identity, immigration, religious fundamentalism, women’s rights, and writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio, and Medium. You can read many of them here. She was the Program Director for the 25 literary salons of Book Group Expo, judges the California Center for the Book’s Letters About Literature Contest and the Lakota Children's Enrichment Writing Project. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, The Author's Guild, The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and sits on the board of Lakota Children’s Enrichment. She regularly conducts interviews, panel discussions, and conversations with authors such as Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Anna Quindlen, Po Bronson, and many others.
Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He’s the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller The Value of Nothing, and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the Financial Times, LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He’s currently a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and is working on a ground breaking documentary project about the global food system with award-winning director Steve James. Read more at RajPatel.org. Follow Raj on Twitter, https://twitter.com/_RajPatel, and Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/RajCPatel.
Oscar Raymundo is a sci-fi novelist and columnist currently working on a sci-fi novel based on his blog, "Confessions of a Boy Toy." In his weekly column, Oscar Raymundo was first to explore the impact of technology and social media on the LGBT community. His writing also has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired and Queerty.com.
Doug Robson
Douglas Robson is an award-winning journalist. He has covered professional tennis since 2002, and written about other sports ranging from cycling and soccer to America’s Cup and the Iditarod. He also has written about business and the business of sports.
Elena Mauli Shapiro is the author of the novels 13 Rue Therese and In the Red, both published by Little, Brown. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, The Farallon Review. She is current at work on a memoir. https://elenamaulishapiro.com.
Eric Tipler is a writer and composer who has worked on music, theater, dance, and opera productions at the Lincoln Center Festival, Belgian National Opera, Salzburg Festival (Austria), Edinburgh International Festival (UK), and the Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington, DC). His writing has appeared in publications including The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, and he's been a resident writer at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, CA. Eric's latest project is a one-act musical about a gay kid from Iowa looking for his first hook up in the big city. More at: facebook.com/OneNightInNewYork.
Rob Tocalino is the former associate editor for Bookmarks Magazine and novelist-in-progress.
Justin Torres is the author of the acclaimed novel We the Animals. He has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and most recently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012's 5 Under 35. He has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endownment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He currently teaches at Columbia University, Lesley University's Low Residency MFA Program, and The Writers' Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph's College. He lives in Brooklyn.
Cameron Tuttle writes like a girl. She is the author of two YA novels, Paisley Hanover Acts Out and Paisley Hanover Kisses and Tells, the bestselling series The Bad Girl’s Guides, and The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide. Her books have inspired a Webby-nominated online community, a TV sitcom, a lawsuit, and countless fender benders. She is currently writing a novel that’s not the least bit funny.
Anna Volpicelli is an Italian Reporter based in San Francisco. She covers Technology for Il Sole 24 Ore, Italian newspaper and other Italian publications and 7x7.
Diane Weipert has worked in film for over a decade. Her screenwriting debut opened the World Cinema Competition at Sundance in 2006 (Solo Dios Sabe—Diego Luna, Alica Braga). She has collaborated on feature film projects with Eddie Izzard, Michelle Rodriguez, Peter Bratt, and John Hays (founder of WildBrain Entertainment), and others. Two of her original scripts are being packaged at agencies in LA. She is currently a resident at the SF Film Society's Film House working on her latest project, Boyle Heights, will be her directorial debut.
Doug Wilkins (aka Whimsical Doggo) is a professional goof-off, and future winner of the Booker Prize (once he becomes a Kiwi) is the author of the forthcoming novel of futuristic nostalgia, Wag and the Distant Bums, as well as the young reader's novel Trudy and the Transdimensional Trolley co-authored with his nephew, Derrick Flakoll. Doug is currently working on a non-fiction memoir of his life in New Zealand, where he resides with his wife and a noble terrier or two.
S. B. Hadley Wilson is currently working on a gay erotic short stories series and romance books in gay fiction and women's fiction. He was born in Bangkok, Thailand, but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a marketing degree at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. He spent most of his career working in data analytics for Fortune 100 companies. In 2011, Wilson walked away from corporate America to dedicate his time to writing. Wilson also spends his time serving as the vice president and a gala co-chair of SF Opera BRAVO! CLUB, on the board of SF Ballet ENCORE!, and on the development committee of Project Inform. He was previously a board member of Minnesota Opera Tempo, and founded and chaired Alzheimer’s Association, St. Louis Chapter, Young Ambassadors. Learn more about his writing projects at www.sbhadleywilson.com.
Bernice Yeung is the author of In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers (The New Press), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has covered topics ranging from human trafficking to domestic violence against immigrant women to the explosion of girls in the juvenile justice system. She was part of the Rape in the Fields reporting team, which won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and was a finalist for a Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Her work has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Seattle Times, the International Herald Tribune, KQED-FM and San Francisco magazine.
Alison Bing is a culture commentator, food writer, art critic, editor, and content maven. Alison's writing credits cover dozens of titles for Lonely Planet and parent company BBC, pop culture and art books for Barnes & Noble and Chronicle Books, news media from San Francisco Chronicle to The Guardian (UK), culture magazines such as Cooking Light, BlackBook, Architectural Record, and Flash Art, and commentary for NPR, NBC, and PBS. She also consults on content for leaders in media, technology, and consumer goods, including Proctor & Gamble, Blurb, NBCi/Universal, TransFair USA, American Documentary Inc., LeapFrog, Telemundo, and FRONTLINE/World. Follow Alison on Twitter: @AlisonBing.
Jeanne Carstensen is a San Francisco-based independent journalist. Since 2015 she has covered the refugee crisis in Europe for PRI’s The World, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Global Post and other outlets with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Jeanne was executive managing editor of The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. She has was managing editor of Salon and an editor at SFGate.com and the Whole Earth Review and a producer at Radio for Peace International, a shortwave station in Costa Rica, where she lived for six years. She was a National Arts Journalism fellow at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, Salon, Religion Dispatches, Al Jazeera America, and other outlets. Read more at www. jeannecarstensen.net. Follow Jeanne on Twitter: @jcarstensen.
Vanessa Chang is a writer, scholar, curator and educator who builds communities and conversations about our virtual and physical encounters with new media and technology. She works with artists, dancers, scholars, technologists, coders and musicians to understand how we might live and move in a technologically mediated world with grace, responsibility, and a sense of play. She also writes about comics, circuses, street art, hip-hop, and disability, and has published essays in Popular Music, Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, American Music, Journal of Visual Culture, and in media res. With roots in Singapore and Australia, she has wandered widely and seems to be planting new ones in San Francisco. http://www.vanessa-chang.com
Spencer Fleury has worked as a sailor, copywriter, economics professor and record store clerk, among other disreputable professions. He was born in the Detroit suburbs, spent most of his life in Florida, and now lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Ascent, Blunderbuss, The Collapsar and Utne Reader, among others, and his first novel, How I’m Spending My Afterlife, was published in October 2017. He has recently completed a story collection and is now working on a novel set aboard a Coast Guard cutter in the mid-1990s. Learn more at www.SpencerFleury.com.
Susie Hara is the author of the novel Finder of Lost Objects, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and winner of a 2015 International Latino Book Award. Her performance works and plays have appeared at the Marsh and Z Space, and her play Lost and Found in the Mission, written with Rowena Richie, received a Best of Fringe award in the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival. When she’s not editing publications at her day job, she’s teaching at the Writing Salon, reading fiction, or doing zumba. Read more at susiehara.net
Scott James is a veteran journalist, best known for reporting about San Francisco and other articles for The New York Times. He is the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, winner of the ★2021 top prize for contemporary nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards. Trial by Fire (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books, 2020) tells the story of The Station nightclub fire, one of America's deadliest criminal cases. James also writes fiction under the pen name Kemble Scott, and is the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, finalist for the national Lambda literary prize for debut fiction. Scott has three Emmy Awards for his work in television news and is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Read more at ScottJamesWriter.com. Follow Scott on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.
Mercilee Jenkins writes plays poetry and short fiction. She is a winner of Poets 11, the citywide poetry contest in San Francisco for 2015 and three of her poems are published in the anthology of the same name. Last year, she presented her poetry at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl and the Basement Series sponsored by the Writers Grotto. Her ten-minute plays, Winning and 50 Love Letters, were winners in the Redwood Writers Play Contest and presented at their Annual Play Festival in Santa Rosa, CA. Actors Theatre of Santa Cruz, CA also selected Winning for production in their 2015 Festival. Her full-length play, Spirit of Detroit, was produced in Detroit at The Wright Museum of African American History in 2014 and premiered at the University of Michigan in 2013. Excerpts of her latest play, The House on Norfolk Road, were performed at Stage Werx and CounterPulse and the entire play will have a stage reading this summer at the Mill Valley Public Library. Her short story, “The Day Mel Tormé Died” was published in the anthology, Sisters Born, Sisters Found, which was just selected as the winner in the Women's Issues category of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Shana Mahaffey is the author of Sounds Like Crazy (NAL/Penguin), a San Francisco Chronicle notable book for Fall 2009. She is a survivor of catechism and cat scratch fever and is a co-founder of the Castro Writers' Cooperative. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sunset Magazine, SoMa Literary Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Reflections Literary Journal, and assorted literary blogs. Shana lives in San Francisco with her husband and two tuxedo cats that require reverence and worship akin to the level proffered by the ancient Egyptians. Read more at www.shanamahaffey.com.
Tina LeCount Myers is a writer, surfer, and gluestick artist. Born in Mexico to expat-bohemian parents, she grew up on Southern California tennis courts with a prophecy hanging over her head; her parents hoped she’d one day be an author. Tina is the author of The Legacy of the Heavens trilogy: The Song of All, Dreams of the Dark Sky, and Breath of Gods. Her work has also appeared in Literary Hub and Tor.com. Tina lives with her adventurer husband and demanding Siamese cat. www.tinalecountmyers.com
Jessica Raya’s latest novel, Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit, was one of iPad Books’ Summer's Most Anticipated in 2017. Her first novel, The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club, published in four languages under a pseudonym, was a Redbook Top 10 Summer Read and a Kirkus Best Books of 2007. Her writing has appeared in magazines and literary journals, as well as the 2010 essay collection What My Father Gave Me: Daughters Speak.
Natacha Ruck is a writer, filmmaker, journalist, podcaster and translator -- basically she's all over the place. Her documentary work has appeared at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as on National Geographic, WNBC NY, and Link TV. Her memoir and podcasting work has aired on NPR affiliates nationally. Humanoids, Image and D.C. Comics have published her translations of French graphic novels. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at USF and is working on a graphic novel and a memoir/cookbook/songbook and travel guide: "Nothing a Dash of Liquor Can't Fix."
Melina Selverston Scher is the author of a historical novel, For You and All of Us, based on the biblical legend of Judith and Holofernes. She is currently writing coming of age novel, drawing from experience, about a young woman who challenges an oil company in the Amazon rainforest. She published a well-received textbook called Ethnopolitics in Ecuador, and numerous articles in the field of Latin American politics, human rights and the environment. She blogs at www.MelinaSelverston.com and performs with Parlor Tricks www.ParlorTricksMusic.com.
Wendy M. Voorsanger is the author of the novel Prospects of a Woman (She Writes Press 2020). Wendy started her career in the Silicon Valley writing about technology trends and innovations for newspapers, magazines, and Fortune 100 companies. She is the author of the yet-to-be-published historical novel, Prospects of a Woman, and is the editor of SheisCalifornia, a blog chronicling women throughout history who helped build California. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in Journalism from California Polytechnic State University. Read more at https://wendyvoorsanger.net.
Our Alumni
Galadrielle Allman was born in Macon, Georgia in 1969, the same place and time as her family's legendary band, the Allman Brothers Band. Her father, Duane Allman, is considered one of the greatest Rock guitarists of all time. Galadrielle was raised primarily in Berkeley, California, where she still lives happily. She studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College, always hoping to tell her family's story. On the eve of her 40th birthday, she began to write her first book: Please Be With Me, A Song for My Father Duane Allman. It was published by Spiegel & Grau in March, 2014 and was chosen by Amazon as a best book of 2014 in two categories: Memoir and Entertainment. She is currently working on a novel that continues to mine the subjects of family, identity and music.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of five novels, including You Killed Wesley Payne and The Infects. His latest is the punk rock opus Wise Young Fool. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Al-Jazeera America. A forthcoming short story collection is due from Algonquin Press in Spring '16. He is also a founding editor of the arts and culture site The Weeklings. (@seanbeaudoin, seanbeaudoin.com, theweeklings.com).
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015) a book-length lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma. Other writing has appeared in publications including Bitch, McSweeney's, 580 Split, and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. Her work has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, This Will Take Time, and Small Press Traffic. Berkowitz is the host of the Amy's Kitchen Organics reading series, the coordinator of the Alley Cat Books writing residency, and the founding editor of Mondo Bummer Books, an experimental small press. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s working on her second book. More at amyberko.com.
Adrienne Bitar is the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization, the first cultural history and analysis of American diet books. Published in 2018, the book analyzes how the obesity epidemic and diet book narratives reflect and shape broad cultural, religious, historical, and moral meaning. Other food research has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Gastronomica, Utopian Studies, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Buzzfeed, Bon Appetit, and The Conversation.
Karen Bjorneby is the author of Hurricane Season, recipient of Foreword’s Honorable Mention as best independent/university press short story collection. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in such places as The Threepenny Review, New Letters, The Sun, North American Review, StoryQuarterly, New Orleans Review, Confrontation, Poetry Daily, and Zocalo Public Square. She’s received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, a Pushcart Special Mention citation, two other Pushcart nominations, and a National Magazine Award nomination. As a freelance editor/instructor, she's guided clients/students through work that has received, among others, a Lambda Literary Award nomination, a Tobias Wolff Award finalist position, and the Iron Horse Essay Award. She’s currently completing her first novel, Naked, Shining, and Alive. www.karenbjorneby.com
Melodie Bowsher is the author of My Lost and Found Life. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Melodie has worked as a freelance business writer in various forms. She is the mother of two, whose crisis-filled teenage years provided fodder for her first novel.
Katie Burke is the author of Urban Playground, a book of profiles featuring San Francisco kids ages five to nine, (SparkPress, 2020). She writes Noe Kids, a monthly column for The Noe Valley Voice, featuring kids ages four to thirteen who live in Noe Valley. Katie has taught creative writing to children and adults in Kenya, South Africa, and San Francisco, and has facilitated workshops with incarcerated journalists at San Quentin through the Society of Professional Journalists. Katie has traveled frequently to New Orleans, and her writing expresses her appreciation for San Francisco's and New Orleans’ eccentric characters. Also a family law attorney, Katie writes judicial and attorney profiles for San Francisco Attorney Magazine. Her writing has appeared in a HarperCollins collection, in the L.A. Times, and on KQED Perspectives. Learn more at www.katieburkeauthor.com.
Michael Chorost is a freelance writer, contributor to Wired and Technology Review, and author of two books: Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (which won the PEN/USA award for Creative Nonfiction in 2006), and World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Human and Machine (The Free Press, Oct. 2010). In 2007 he scriptwrote a PBS show, The 22nd Century. Mike focuses on how technology is changing communication and the body. In July 2008 he moved temporarily to Washington D.C. to be a visiting professor at Gallaudet University, and in August 2009 decided to stay in D.C. permanently (having met his wife) while continuing to work as a freelancer. Although now an alumnus, he calls his home office The Sanchez Grotto Annex, East Coast Branch. He keeps a blog at www.michaelchorost.com.
Joshua Citrak is the creator of slouch magazine, and his work has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, Air In the Paragraph Line, SoMa Literary Review, Instant City and a whole bunch of others that he can't remember at the moment. He is currently at work on his first best seller. Follow Josh on Twitter: @JoshuaCitrak.
Andrea Coombes pays the bills by writing about personal finance for the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Consumers Digest and others. She ghost-wrote a book about entrepreneurship and was the revising author on a book on consumer credit reports. She likes to believe that writing about retirement savings and other money topics is helping someone, somewhere, but she gets grouchy when people want to talk hot stocks, investing in gold or the imminent collapse of the monetary system. Coombes is working on a memoir about her elegantly outlandish mother, an Austrian immigrant whose penchant for drinking, smoking and fast driving eventually led her to self-destruct. Coombes also writes personal essays; here’s her favorite. Follow her on Twitter: @andreacoombes
Yalitza Ferreras is a 2014-2015 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where she won the Delbanco Thesis Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Daring to Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women.
Michelle Gagnon is a former modern dancer, bartender, dog walker, model, personal trainer, and Russian supper club performer. Her IMBA bestselling novels have been published in North America, France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Australia. Her debut thriller THE TUNNELS (June 2007) involves a series of ritualized murders in the abandoned tunnel system beneath a university. BONEYARD (July 2008) depicts a cat and mouse game between dueling serial killers and was described by the Chicago Tribune as, "utterly gripping...an addictively readable thriller." THE GATEKEEPER (November 2009) concerns a domestic terror plot by anti-immigration hate groups. Michelle is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. In her spare time she runs errands and indulges a weakness for Scrabble, stale cinema popcorn, and Hollywood blockbusters. Read more at www.michellegagnon.com.
Laura Goode is the author of a collection of poems, Become a Name (Fathom Books, 2016), and a novel for young adults, Sister Mischief (Candlewick Press, 2011). She wrote (with director Meera Menon) and produced the feature film Farah Goes Bang; FGB premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and won the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue. Her nonfiction has appeared in BuzzFeed, Longreads, ELLE, Refinery29, New Republic, New York Magazine, Fusion, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Bright Ideas, where she is a contributing editor. She received her BA and MFA from Columbia University and lives in San Francisco. lauragoode.com // @lauragoode // tinyletter.com/lauragoode
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the librettist of Unfinished: An Opera, a new work about the death and life of a women’s college, currently in development with composer Joshua Groffman and producer Vital Opera. Unfinished debuted in summer 2016 at sold-out engagements in Sarah’s native Hudson River Valley and at the National Opera Center in New York City, where it returned in October 2018. Sarah is also the author of Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award, and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress collaboration with book artist Leah Virsik. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a finalist for the 2017 National Poetry Series. Sarah works in fundraising at the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and social justice and is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two contemporary YA novels, Enter Title Here and We Are Totally Normal (HarperTeen, ’20). Additionally, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF Lightspeed, The Indiana Review, and Nature. She’s currently working on her first novel for adults. If you want to know more you can visit er blog at The War on Loneliness.
Evan Karp is a seeker of fortune in the form of trite interior monologue. He started and runs Quiet Lightning and Litseen and a life-full of other projects you'd probably respect, if not love, and of which you could almost certainly be a part. Visit otherpeople.info to question all your burning answers.
Mike Karpa is a San Francisco writer whose short fiction has appeared in Tin House (forthcoming), Sixfold, Faultline and other literary magazines, as have selections from Between Countries, an unpublished novel rooted in his early years in Bombay. Also a translator, he has translated Bai Xian-yung (from Chinese) and million-selling author Taichi Sakaiya (from Japanese) and written about translation for national and international publications. A sometime visiting professor of Japanese translation at the Monterey Institute, he has served as a staff translator at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in criminal investigations and is currently editing Criminals, his novel of hapless drug smugglers in 1990s Tokyo, for the final time. Again. www.mikekarpa.com
Ammi Keller is the publisher of the the zine "Emergency" since 1998. A Wallace Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford for 2008-2009, Ammi is at work on a novel-in-stories about gender, race, disaster capitalism and Hurricane Katrina, one of which was a Most Read Story of the Year at Joyland. Another of her her stories appears in the Fall 2014 issue of American Short Fiction. Ammi teaches in the Certificate Program in Novel Writing at Stanford University.
Jeff Kirschner is the father of two ridiculous kids, storyteller, and founder of Litterati.
Lee Daniel Kravetz is a veteran writer and author of author of the books Strange Contagions: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves and Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering & Success. He has written for print and television, including The New York Times, Psychology Today, and The San Francisco Chronicle, as well as Frontline, NOVA, and Sesame Street. He is a founding board member of the Lit Camp Writers Conference, which produces the Basement Reading Series. For more information, visit www.leedanielkravetz.com
Nick Krieger is the author of the memoir, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender (Beacon Press, 2011), winner of a Stonewall Honor Book Award and an Independent Literary Award. His writing has also earned several travel-writing awards and has been published in multiple travel guides. In 2013, he received a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. He's currently working on a book weaving together his spiritual path and transgender experience, also known as a queer yoga memoir. When he's not at his day job, Nick teaches writing seminars, leads yoga classes & workshops, and speaks at universities around the country. He holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Kathryn Lefroy is an Australian born writer now residing in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in many art/culture, technology and academic publications, and her screenwriting has twice been shortlisted for Screen Australia awards. In 2010 she completed her PhD in business, and prior to relocating to the US she was a professor at one of Australia's top universities. She's currently working on two novels--a rollicking MG adventure and an erotic chick-lit. When she's not writing she's playing the ukulele (badly).
Paul Linde a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, is author of the nonfiction book Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist, published by the University of California Press in January 2010. He's worked in the San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Service, where he teaches psychiatric residents, interns, medical students, and nursing students, since 1992. His writing has been compared to that of Alexander Luria, Oliver Sacks, and Sherwin Nuland. His first book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2002. Linde has also contributed to the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and JAMA. He's written animation screenplays and also created, produced, and hosted a weekly health program on KALW Radio in San Francisco.
Jenelle Lindsay is Film and Television EVP for Unanimous Media. As a television writer she wrote for the Teen Nickelodeon drama South of Nowhere as well as soap operas Guiding Light, The Young and The Restless and Port Charles. She also worked as a television executive for Sony Pictures Television, Katalyst Media and Endemol USA. She continues to work in non-fiction as well, producing several documentaries, with the focus now on Soufra, an inspiring story about a refugee food truck. And when she needs an outlet, she writes humorous pieces - from a Teen Trump satire series to anti-parenting advice - on Medium: https://medium.com/@julindsay
Jennifer Lou has authored several thousand emails and instant messages, most of which were penned while working at Google and then at AdMob, which was then acquired by Google. She has published a short story in the anthology Breakfast from Mars and is the co-editor of Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All written by the Rock Bottom Remainders. She serves on the Board of Youth Speaks and has a BA in English Literature from Columbia University. She misses the otter rodeo at Monterey Bay Aquarium and looks forward to volunteering there again one day.
Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow, 2013) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008), favorably reviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books and American Book Review, among other places. Her poetry and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Coconut, DIAGRAM,Berfrois, Conversations at the Wartime Café, HuffPost Impact, Writerland, and elsewhere.
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the novel, Mary, (Harcourt), and the memoir, The Russian Word for Snow, (St. Martin's Press). Her new novel, A Master Plan for Rescue, is forthcoming from Riverhead in Summer 2015. Her travel stories have appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the founder of the Lit Camp writers conference and The Basement Series, a literary reading series.
John Pacheco is at work on his first novel. He lives in the Castro and has organized the weekly Shut Up and Write! event at Borderlands Cafe.
Susanne Pari is an Iranian-American novelist, book reviewer, and essayist. Her novel, The Fortune Catcher, tells the story of a young woman—American and Iranian, Jewish and Muslim—caught in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Susanne writes and speaks on issues of American identity, immigration, religious fundamentalism, women’s rights, and writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio, and Medium. You can read many of them here. She was the Program Director for the 25 literary salons of Book Group Expo, judges the California Center for the Book’s Letters About Literature Contest and the Lakota Children's Enrichment Writing Project. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, The Author's Guild, The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and sits on the board of Lakota Children’s Enrichment. She regularly conducts interviews, panel discussions, and conversations with authors such as Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Anna Quindlen, Po Bronson, and many others.
Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He’s the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller The Value of Nothing, and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the Financial Times, LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He’s currently a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and is working on a ground breaking documentary project about the global food system with award-winning director Steve James. Read more at RajPatel.org. Follow Raj on Twitter, https://twitter.com/_RajPatel, and Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/RajCPatel.
Oscar Raymundo is a sci-fi novelist and columnist currently working on a sci-fi novel based on his blog, "Confessions of a Boy Toy." In his weekly column, Oscar Raymundo was first to explore the impact of technology and social media on the LGBT community. His writing also has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired and Queerty.com.
Doug Robson
Douglas Robson is an award-winning journalist. He has covered professional tennis since 2002, and written about other sports ranging from cycling and soccer to America’s Cup and the Iditarod. He also has written about business and the business of sports.
Elena Mauli Shapiro is the author of the novels 13 Rue Therese and In the Red, both published by Little, Brown. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, The Farallon Review. She is current at work on a memoir. https://elenamaulishapiro.com.
Eric Tipler is a writer and composer who has worked on music, theater, dance, and opera productions at the Lincoln Center Festival, Belgian National Opera, Salzburg Festival (Austria), Edinburgh International Festival (UK), and the Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington, DC). His writing has appeared in publications including The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, and he's been a resident writer at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, CA. Eric's latest project is a one-act musical about a gay kid from Iowa looking for his first hook up in the big city. More at: facebook.com/OneNightInNewYork.
Rob Tocalino is the former associate editor for Bookmarks Magazine and novelist-in-progress.
Justin Torres is the author of the acclaimed novel We the Animals. He has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and most recently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012's 5 Under 35. He has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endownment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He currently teaches at Columbia University, Lesley University's Low Residency MFA Program, and The Writers' Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph's College. He lives in Brooklyn.
Cameron Tuttle writes like a girl. She is the author of two YA novels, Paisley Hanover Acts Out and Paisley Hanover Kisses and Tells, the bestselling series The Bad Girl’s Guides, and The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide. Her books have inspired a Webby-nominated online community, a TV sitcom, a lawsuit, and countless fender benders. She is currently writing a novel that’s not the least bit funny.
Anna Volpicelli is an Italian Reporter based in San Francisco. She covers Technology for Il Sole 24 Ore, Italian newspaper and other Italian publications and 7x7.
Diane Weipert has worked in film for over a decade. Her screenwriting debut opened the World Cinema Competition at Sundance in 2006 (Solo Dios Sabe—Diego Luna, Alica Braga). She has collaborated on feature film projects with Eddie Izzard, Michelle Rodriguez, Peter Bratt, and John Hays (founder of WildBrain Entertainment), and others. Two of her original scripts are being packaged at agencies in LA. She is currently a resident at the SF Film Society's Film House working on her latest project, Boyle Heights, will be her directorial debut.
Doug Wilkins (aka Whimsical Doggo) is a professional goof-off, and future winner of the Booker Prize (once he becomes a Kiwi) is the author of the forthcoming novel of futuristic nostalgia, Wag and the Distant Bums, as well as the young reader's novel Trudy and the Transdimensional Trolley co-authored with his nephew, Derrick Flakoll. Doug is currently working on a non-fiction memoir of his life in New Zealand, where he resides with his wife and a noble terrier or two.
S. B. Hadley Wilson is currently working on a gay erotic short stories series and romance books in gay fiction and women's fiction. He was born in Bangkok, Thailand, but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a marketing degree at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. He spent most of his career working in data analytics for Fortune 100 companies. In 2011, Wilson walked away from corporate America to dedicate his time to writing. Wilson also spends his time serving as the vice president and a gala co-chair of SF Opera BRAVO! CLUB, on the board of SF Ballet ENCORE!, and on the development committee of Project Inform. He was previously a board member of Minnesota Opera Tempo, and founded and chaired Alzheimer’s Association, St. Louis Chapter, Young Ambassadors. Learn more about his writing projects at www.sbhadleywilson.com.
Bernice Yeung is the author of In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers (The New Press), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has covered topics ranging from human trafficking to domestic violence against immigrant women to the explosion of girls in the juvenile justice system. She was part of the Rape in the Fields reporting team, which won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and was a finalist for a Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Her work has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Seattle Times, the International Herald Tribune, KQED-FM and San Francisco magazine.
