Our Writers and 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, and studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She's the author of Please Be With Me, A Song for My Father Duane Allman.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of five novels, including You Killed Wesley Payne, The Infects and Wise Young Fool. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Al-Jazeera America. seanbeaudoin.com
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, a book about chronic pain, trauma, Twin Peaks, and bad doctors, and a collection of poems called Gravitas. She’s working on a novel that she likes to call Untitled Bisexual Jumpsuits Project. They live in San Francisco, where they cohost the Light Jacket Reading Series. amyberko.com
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. @AlisonBing
Adrienne Bitar is the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization, an analysis of American diet books. Her food research has been also appeared 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. 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.
Katie Burke is the author of Urban Playground, a book of profiles featuring San Francisco kids ages five to nine. Also a family law attorney, Katie's work has appeared in San Francisco Attorney Magazine, the L.A. Times, and on KQED Perspectives.
Michael Chorost is the author of Rebuilt, winner of the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. His second book, World Wide Mind, explored what it really means to “read a mind." He has published in Smithsonian, Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Yorker’s blog, Wired, and elsewhere. He has given 170 lectures at university, corporate, and nonprofit venues. Refreshingly deaf, he now hears with cochlear implants. michaelchorost.com.
Joshua Citrak is featured in the collection Awkward. He's 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.
Jeanne Carstensen is the author of A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, long-listed for a national PEN America Literary Award. She's an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The World, The Nation, Salon, Nautilus, and The Global Post, among other outlets. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey with support from the Pulitzer Center and was short-listed for the Immigration Journalism Awards. Carstensen has been awarded fellowships at the Logan Nonfiction Program, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and Mesa Refuge, where she was the Peter Barnes Long-form Journalism honoree. Previously, she was managing editor of Salon and The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. Born in Portland, Oregon, Carstensen has lived in France, Greece, and Costa Rica, where she was a shortwave radio producer and translator. She lives in San Francisco. jeannecarstensen.net On X: @jcarstensen
Vanessa Chang is the author of The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT. She writes, curates, and teaches about new and old media, the history and philosophy of technology, design, disability and creative access, cities, comics, animation, circuses, and more. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also ran the Graphic Narrative Project. She's also taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts and was lead curator with CODAME Art & Tech. She grew up in Singapore and Australia and is now based in San Francisco. vanessa-chang.com
Andrea Coombes is an editor at Bankrate, translates complex personal finance topics into understandable language that helps people live their best financial lives. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, MarketWatch and many newspapers nationwide.
Yalitza Ferreras was the 2022-2023 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where she won the Thesis Prize. yalitza.com
Spencer Fleury is the author of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco. SpencerFleury.com
Michelle Gagnon writes thrillers, including Killing Me, Slaying You, The Tunnels, Boneyard, The Gatekeeper, Kidnap & Ransom, No Escape, Don't Turn Around, Don't Look Now, and Don't Let Go. She provides mental health services at the LA LGBT Center, and lives in Los Angeles with her family. 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
Susie Hara is the author of the novels Earthquake Shack, The House on Ashbury Street, and Finder of Lost Objects, which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and received an International Latino Book Award. Her writing has also appeared in Fractured Lit and The New York Times. She lives and works in San Francisco. susiehara.net
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. sarahheady.com.
Castro Writers' Cooperative Co-Founder
Scott James is the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, winner of the top prize for contemporary nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, and he has three Emmy Awards for his work in television news. 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. ScottJamesWriter.com. Follow Scott on Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads, and very begrudgingly, X.
Mercilee Jenkins writes plays poetry and short fiction. She is a winner of Poets 11, the citywide poetry contest in San Francisco, and three of her poems are published in the anthology of the same name. 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. Her short story, “The Day Mel Tormé Died” was published in the anthology, Sisters Born, Sisters Found, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award.
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.
Evan Karp is the creator and executive director of Quiet Lightning, which the Los Angeles Review of Books has called “collective alchemy,” and the founding editor of Litseen, recognized by the New York Times as a go-to, near-comprehensive source for Bay Area literary events. He’s covered literary culture in columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF/Arts and SF Weekly, and his writing has appeared in Guardian UK, BOMBlog, Eleven Eleven and many other places.
Mike Karpa’s fiction, memoir and nonfiction can be found in Tin House, Foglifter, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and other magazines. He is the author of Criminals, a literary thriller that was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022 (Indie), as well as the upbeat scifi romance Red Dot and now The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, the story of an NYC family that Kirkus Reviews called "a deeply satisfying story that’s written with intelligence and wit". It recently won Best LGBTQ Book at the San Francisco Book Festival. He lives with his husband and dog in San Francisco. mikekarpa.com
Ammi Keller has been writing, teaching, and/or working in book publishing since 1996. Ammi was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her short stories can be found in The Common, American Short Fiction, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Norton Island Colony, and the Lambda Retreat for Emerging Writers. Starting in the late '90s, Ammi penned the zine Emergency. She is currently at work on a book of short stories about GenX women and queer people during the COVID pandemic. ammikeller.com
Jeff Kirschner is the father of two ridiculous kids, storyteller, and founder of Litterati.
Lee Daniel Kravetz is the author of the novel The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., as well as acclaimed nonfiction, Strange Contagion and SuperSurvivors. He has written for print and television, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, The Daily Beast, The San Francisco Chronicle, and PBS. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. leekravetz.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 holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Kathryn Lefroy writes fiction novels, screenplays, and nonfiction content for some of the world’s top brands. She has a first class honours degree in Art History from the University of Melbourne, a PhD in Marketing from Monash University, and is a graduate of UCLA’s professional screenwriting program. kathrynlefroy.com
Paul Linde is author of the nonfiction book Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist. He's worked in the San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Service. His first book was Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. 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 Executive Vice President of Television of Avalon, the production company behind HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and FX/Sky comedy Breeders. Previously she was 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.
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.
Castro Writers' Cooperative Co-Founder
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. shanamahaffey.com
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.
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
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the novels, Mary; Mrs A. Lincoln, which was a Finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and USA Today’s Historical Novel of the Year, and A Master Plan for Rescue, which was an SF Chronicle Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of The Russian Word for Snow, a memoir about adopting her son from Russia. Newman is the founder of the Lit Camp writers conference, and Page Street, a co-working space for writers in San Francisco. A long-time creative writing teacher and meditator, she has taught writing and mindfulness workshops at Esalen and for the SF Zen Center. janiscookenewman.com
John Pacheco lives in the Castro and has organized the weekly Shut Up and Write! event at Borderlands Cafe.
Susanne Pari Susanne Pari is a novelist, book reviewer, essayist, and interviewer. Her most recent novel, In the Time of Our History, examines the entangled lives of an Iranian American family grappling with generational culture clashes and the rebellion of its women. It was an IndieNext Pick, a Target Book Club Pick, a 2023 Women’s National Book Association Group Reads Selection, a Book Browse 2023 Best Books Selection, and a Hoopla Spotlight Selection. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher, about the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, was first published in 1997 and translated into six languages. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. susannepari.com
Raj Patel Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. He is the co-author with Jason W. Moore of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and co-authored with Rupa Marya, is entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice. RajPatel.org
Jessica Raya is the author of Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit, was one of iPad Books’ Summer's Most Anticipated books. 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 selection. Her writing has appeared in magazines and literary journals, as well as the essay collection What My Father Gave Me: Daughters Speak. jessicaraya.com
Oscar Raymundo has developed, written, and produced original features for Meta and Apple’s official social channels. His journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, Vogue Mexico, Vice, National Geographic Traveler, and others. oscarraymundo.com
Doug 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.
Natacha Ruck is a writer, filmmaker, journalist, podcaster and translator. 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.
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, and the textbook called Ethnopolitics in Ecuador, plus numerous articles in the field of Latin American politics, human rights and the environment. MelinaSelverston.com
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. 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.
Rob Tocalino is the former associate editor for Bookmarks Magazine. His work has also included positions at the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis, SFJAZZ, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.
Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary award, and the Southern California Book Award. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, he’s also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. 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 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 Endowment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. justin-torres.com
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 for Italian newspapers and other Italian publications.
Wendy M. Voorsanger is the author of the novel Prospects of a Woman. Wendy started her career in the Silicon Valley writing about technology trends and innovations for newspapers, magazines, and Fortune 100 companies. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in Journalism from California Polytechnic State University. wendyvoorsanger.net
Diane Weipert is a screenwriter. Her screenwriting debut opened the World Cinema Competition at Sundance in 2006 ("Solo Dios Sabe.," starring Diego Luna and 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.
Founding Founder
Doug Wilkins (aka Whimsical Doggo) is the founder of the Sanchez Annex, the previous iteration of The Coop. He's the author of the young reader's novel Trudy and the Transdimensional Trolley, co-authored with his nephew, Derrick Flakoll.
S. B. Hadley Wilson is Director of Development at Broadway Sacramento, and served as 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.
Bernice Yeung is the managing director and managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Previously, she was a reporter for ProPublica and The Center for Investigative Reporting. She is the author of In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, which was honored with the PEN America/John Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in media outlets ranging from The New Yorker to The New York Times to PBS Frontline. The collaborative reporting she’s done as part of various investigative teams has been a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and has received honors such as a National Press Club Award, a George Polk Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
James Yu is a writer, hacker, and entrepreneur. His work explores how technology alters everyday society and our closest relationships. You can find his stories featured in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Terraform, and various anthologies. He is the author of The Fourth Minute, and contributor to Working Futures: 14 Speculative Stories About The Future Of Work.
Edmund Zagorin is a Bay Area writer, performer, playwright, and author of the short stories collection The Face of Our Town, published under the pen name Elizeya Quate. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and publications, including The American Prospect, The Huffington Post, Critical Moment, and the anthology Writing That Risks: New Work From Beyond The Mainstream. elizeyaquate.com
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, and studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She's the author of Please Be With Me, A Song for My Father Duane Allman.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of five novels, including You Killed Wesley Payne, The Infects and Wise Young Fool. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Al-Jazeera America. seanbeaudoin.com
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, a book about chronic pain, trauma, Twin Peaks, and bad doctors, and a collection of poems called Gravitas. She’s working on a novel that she likes to call Untitled Bisexual Jumpsuits Project. They live in San Francisco, where they cohost the Light Jacket Reading Series. amyberko.com
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. @AlisonBing
Adrienne Bitar is the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization, an analysis of American diet books. Her food research has been also appeared 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. 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.
Katie Burke is the author of Urban Playground, a book of profiles featuring San Francisco kids ages five to nine. Also a family law attorney, Katie's work has appeared in San Francisco Attorney Magazine, the L.A. Times, and on KQED Perspectives.
Michael Chorost is the author of Rebuilt, winner of the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. His second book, World Wide Mind, explored what it really means to “read a mind." He has published in Smithsonian, Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Yorker’s blog, Wired, and elsewhere. He has given 170 lectures at university, corporate, and nonprofit venues. Refreshingly deaf, he now hears with cochlear implants. michaelchorost.com.
Joshua Citrak is featured in the collection Awkward. He's 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.
Jeanne Carstensen is the author of A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, long-listed for a national PEN America Literary Award. She's an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The World, The Nation, Salon, Nautilus, and The Global Post, among other outlets. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey with support from the Pulitzer Center and was short-listed for the Immigration Journalism Awards. Carstensen has been awarded fellowships at the Logan Nonfiction Program, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and Mesa Refuge, where she was the Peter Barnes Long-form Journalism honoree. Previously, she was managing editor of Salon and The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. Born in Portland, Oregon, Carstensen has lived in France, Greece, and Costa Rica, where she was a shortwave radio producer and translator. She lives in San Francisco. jeannecarstensen.net On X: @jcarstensen
Vanessa Chang is the author of The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT. She writes, curates, and teaches about new and old media, the history and philosophy of technology, design, disability and creative access, cities, comics, animation, circuses, and more. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also ran the Graphic Narrative Project. She's also taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts and was lead curator with CODAME Art & Tech. She grew up in Singapore and Australia and is now based in San Francisco. vanessa-chang.com
Andrea Coombes is an editor at Bankrate, translates complex personal finance topics into understandable language that helps people live their best financial lives. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, MarketWatch and many newspapers nationwide.
Yalitza Ferreras was the 2022-2023 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where she won the Thesis Prize. yalitza.com
Spencer Fleury is the author of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco. SpencerFleury.com
Michelle Gagnon writes thrillers, including Killing Me, Slaying You, The Tunnels, Boneyard, The Gatekeeper, Kidnap & Ransom, No Escape, Don't Turn Around, Don't Look Now, and Don't Let Go. She provides mental health services at the LA LGBT Center, and lives in Los Angeles with her family. 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
Susie Hara is the author of the novels Earthquake Shack, The House on Ashbury Street, and Finder of Lost Objects, which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and received an International Latino Book Award. Her writing has also appeared in Fractured Lit and The New York Times. She lives and works in San Francisco. susiehara.net
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. sarahheady.com.
Castro Writers' Cooperative Co-Founder
Scott James is the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, winner of the top prize for contemporary nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, and he has three Emmy Awards for his work in television news. 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. ScottJamesWriter.com. Follow Scott on Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads, and very begrudgingly, X.
Mercilee Jenkins writes plays poetry and short fiction. She is a winner of Poets 11, the citywide poetry contest in San Francisco, and three of her poems are published in the anthology of the same name. 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. Her short story, “The Day Mel Tormé Died” was published in the anthology, Sisters Born, Sisters Found, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award.
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.
Evan Karp is the creator and executive director of Quiet Lightning, which the Los Angeles Review of Books has called “collective alchemy,” and the founding editor of Litseen, recognized by the New York Times as a go-to, near-comprehensive source for Bay Area literary events. He’s covered literary culture in columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF/Arts and SF Weekly, and his writing has appeared in Guardian UK, BOMBlog, Eleven Eleven and many other places.
Mike Karpa’s fiction, memoir and nonfiction can be found in Tin House, Foglifter, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and other magazines. He is the author of Criminals, a literary thriller that was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022 (Indie), as well as the upbeat scifi romance Red Dot and now The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, the story of an NYC family that Kirkus Reviews called "a deeply satisfying story that’s written with intelligence and wit". It recently won Best LGBTQ Book at the San Francisco Book Festival. He lives with his husband and dog in San Francisco. mikekarpa.com
Ammi Keller has been writing, teaching, and/or working in book publishing since 1996. Ammi was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her short stories can be found in The Common, American Short Fiction, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Norton Island Colony, and the Lambda Retreat for Emerging Writers. Starting in the late '90s, Ammi penned the zine Emergency. She is currently at work on a book of short stories about GenX women and queer people during the COVID pandemic. ammikeller.com
Jeff Kirschner is the father of two ridiculous kids, storyteller, and founder of Litterati.
Lee Daniel Kravetz is the author of the novel The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., as well as acclaimed nonfiction, Strange Contagion and SuperSurvivors. He has written for print and television, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, The Daily Beast, The San Francisco Chronicle, and PBS. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. leekravetz.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 holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Kathryn Lefroy writes fiction novels, screenplays, and nonfiction content for some of the world’s top brands. She has a first class honours degree in Art History from the University of Melbourne, a PhD in Marketing from Monash University, and is a graduate of UCLA’s professional screenwriting program. kathrynlefroy.com
Paul Linde is author of the nonfiction book Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist. He's worked in the San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Service. His first book was Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. 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 Executive Vice President of Television of Avalon, the production company behind HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and FX/Sky comedy Breeders. Previously she was 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.
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.
Castro Writers' Cooperative Co-Founder
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. shanamahaffey.com
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.
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
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the novels, Mary; Mrs A. Lincoln, which was a Finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and USA Today’s Historical Novel of the Year, and A Master Plan for Rescue, which was an SF Chronicle Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of The Russian Word for Snow, a memoir about adopting her son from Russia. Newman is the founder of the Lit Camp writers conference, and Page Street, a co-working space for writers in San Francisco. A long-time creative writing teacher and meditator, she has taught writing and mindfulness workshops at Esalen and for the SF Zen Center. janiscookenewman.com
John Pacheco lives in the Castro and has organized the weekly Shut Up and Write! event at Borderlands Cafe.
Susanne Pari Susanne Pari is a novelist, book reviewer, essayist, and interviewer. Her most recent novel, In the Time of Our History, examines the entangled lives of an Iranian American family grappling with generational culture clashes and the rebellion of its women. It was an IndieNext Pick, a Target Book Club Pick, a 2023 Women’s National Book Association Group Reads Selection, a Book Browse 2023 Best Books Selection, and a Hoopla Spotlight Selection. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher, about the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, was first published in 1997 and translated into six languages. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. susannepari.com
Raj Patel Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. He is the co-author with Jason W. Moore of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and co-authored with Rupa Marya, is entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice. RajPatel.org
Jessica Raya is the author of Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit, was one of iPad Books’ Summer's Most Anticipated books. 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 selection. Her writing has appeared in magazines and literary journals, as well as the essay collection What My Father Gave Me: Daughters Speak. jessicaraya.com
Oscar Raymundo has developed, written, and produced original features for Meta and Apple’s official social channels. His journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, Vogue Mexico, Vice, National Geographic Traveler, and others. oscarraymundo.com
Doug 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.
Natacha Ruck is a writer, filmmaker, journalist, podcaster and translator. 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.
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, and the textbook called Ethnopolitics in Ecuador, plus numerous articles in the field of Latin American politics, human rights and the environment. MelinaSelverston.com
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. 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.
Rob Tocalino is the former associate editor for Bookmarks Magazine. His work has also included positions at the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis, SFJAZZ, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.
Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary award, and the Southern California Book Award. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, he’s also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. 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 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 Endowment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. justin-torres.com
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 for Italian newspapers and other Italian publications.
Wendy M. Voorsanger is the author of the novel Prospects of a Woman. Wendy started her career in the Silicon Valley writing about technology trends and innovations for newspapers, magazines, and Fortune 100 companies. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in Journalism from California Polytechnic State University. wendyvoorsanger.net
Diane Weipert is a screenwriter. Her screenwriting debut opened the World Cinema Competition at Sundance in 2006 ("Solo Dios Sabe.," starring Diego Luna and 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.
Founding Founder
Doug Wilkins (aka Whimsical Doggo) is the founder of the Sanchez Annex, the previous iteration of The Coop. He's the author of the young reader's novel Trudy and the Transdimensional Trolley, co-authored with his nephew, Derrick Flakoll.
S. B. Hadley Wilson is Director of Development at Broadway Sacramento, and served as 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.
Bernice Yeung is the managing director and managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Previously, she was a reporter for ProPublica and The Center for Investigative Reporting. She is the author of In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, which was honored with the PEN America/John Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in media outlets ranging from The New Yorker to The New York Times to PBS Frontline. The collaborative reporting she’s done as part of various investigative teams has been a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and has received honors such as a National Press Club Award, a George Polk Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
James Yu is a writer, hacker, and entrepreneur. His work explores how technology alters everyday society and our closest relationships. You can find his stories featured in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Terraform, and various anthologies. He is the author of The Fourth Minute, and contributor to Working Futures: 14 Speculative Stories About The Future Of Work.
Edmund Zagorin is a Bay Area writer, performer, playwright, and author of the short stories collection The Face of Our Town, published under the pen name Elizeya Quate. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and publications, including The American Prospect, The Huffington Post, Critical Moment, and the anthology Writing That Risks: New Work From Beyond The Mainstream. elizeyaquate.com