Creative Nonfiction

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; All the Agents and Saints; and Art Above Everything. Widely anthologized, Elizondo Griest has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, Orion, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes, and has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Currently Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.

Poetry

Shonda Buchana’s fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Third Coast, Redivider, and Tin House Flash Fridays, among other publications; her nonfiction has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Lit, The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The American Scholar. Her work has received fellowships and grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences..

Fiction

Claire Stanford is the author of the novel Happy for You (Viking, 2022), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and awarded the 2023 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in English from UCLA. Born and raised in Berkeley, she currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Fiction

Monée Fields-White is a writer and storyteller whose work blends journalism and literary fiction. Over a career spanning more than 15 years, she has created compelling feature stories, intimate profiles, and documentary series; her work has appeared in Bloomberg News, The Root, NPR, Fast Company, and other notable publications. She produced the Discovery+ documentary series “Uprooted” (2022) and the Netflix series “Files of the Unexplained” (2024).

Monée currently serves as the managing editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal. Her literary work explores the complexities of Black families—secrets passed down through generations, fragile bonds that hold them together, and the ways one seeks reconciliation with the life they inherit. Her writings have received support from Anaphora Arts, Tin House, Writer Studio New York, and the Paris Writers’ Workshop.

Nonfiction

Hannah Horcha is a writer based in Los Angeles, California. Her short stories have appeared in Porter House Literary Review, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions Anthology and she was a finalist for the 57th New Millenium Writing Awards. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Fiction

DeLana Orr is a Los Angeles–based writer whose fiction interrogates systemic violence and institutional failure. Her debut novel follows the hidden networks of sex trafficking of underage girls in urban America. With fifteen years of clinical research experience, she brings precision and authority to her investigations of how vulnerable populations are erased within complex systems. She is developing a second novel on gentrification and displacement, continuing her exploration of power, neglect, and survival.

Fiction

Patricia Kelly Yeo is a writer and journalist from Los Angeles with essays in Joyland, Catapult, Sine Theta, the Sunday Long Read and the now-defunct Man Repeller. During the day, she covers food and drink for Time Out Los Angeles. She is currently at work on her first novel, Desire Paths, a coming-of-age story about Asian Americans in the tech industry set in the American South.

Fiction

Jones Jones is a nonbinary writer and award-winning drag king based in Los Angeles. Their work focuses on exploring and eradicating shame in the areas of mental illness, queerness, and the body. Their nonfiction short Clowns, Drag, and Gender is forthcoming in CLOWNS: An Anthology (2026). They currently work under Michelle Tea as the Media and Communications Manager at DOPAMINE Press.

Poetry

Jessica Rowshandel (they/them) is a queer Afro-Boricua (Puerto Rican) + Persian writer, visual artist, and musician. Their creative writing has been published in anthologies like Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs (Rebel Satori Press) and in various literary magazines, like beestung, Lucky Jefferson, Plantin Magazine, and others. For more information please visit jessicarowshandel.com.

Poetry

Vikesh Kapoor is a multidisciplinary artist from rural Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in The Normal School. He is an alumnus of the the Tin House Summer Workshop and VONA. He was a finalist for The Kenyon Review 2024 Poetry Contest, The Sewanee Review 2020 Poetry Contest, and the Brooklyn Poets 2024 Fellowship. He has received scholarships from Poets House, Kundiman and Grub Street. Kapoor’s work will make its museum debut at the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian) in October 2025.

Poetry

J.G. Simiński, poet, short story writer, memoirist, and creative nonfiction writer. Selected as a 2025 finalist for the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the poem “Shenandoah.” Selected as one of 15 writers for the November 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices Workshop (LA Cohort), a 2024 Poetry Fellowship recipient of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and recipient of a 2025 T.S. Eliot Summer School scholarship, Merton College, Oxford. Simiński’s poetry has appeared in, So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Foglifter Press, Reforestation, The Kintsugi Journal, Frozen Sea Literary, Visual Verse (UK), & The Hawaii Review. Simiński ‘s short essay, “No Laughing Matter” was shortlisted by The Fountain Magazine. Siminski’s YA LGBTQ short story, Math = Silence was published by Story Shares. Story Shares selected Simiński as the Gay Pride Author of 2024. Simiński also studied Shakespeare and the Classics at Balliol College, Oxford through a special program associated with Juilliard and U.C.L.A.

Creative Nonfiction

Julia Childs Heyl is a licensed psychotherapist and writer based in Pasadena, CA. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master of Social Work with an emphasis on Critical Race Theory from California State University, Dominguez Hills. She has traveled to universities nationally and internationally to speak on generational trauma in the Black community. Specializing in trauma therapy, she was a 2020 Council on Social Work Education Minority Fellow and has contributed to the American Journal of Public Health, Verywell Mind, and Parents. She is currently working on a memoir about grief, land, and legacy.

Creative Nonfiction

Heidi Lepe (she/her/ella) is a Honduran and Mexican-American writer based in Los Angeles, California. She practices the art of storytelling by writing from her embodied experience and identity as a Latina and daughter of immigrants. Her work has been featured in the Altadena Poetry Review, La Raíz Magazine as well as Latina-led news and media pages of HipLatina and FIERCE by Mitú. She is a consultant for collective., a California-based creative agency firm, and is the senior communications manager for 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the country.

Creative Nonfiction

Jean Trinh is a James Beard Award-nominated journalist, whose articles have been featured in publications like Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Food & Wine. She’s been writing about food, culture, travel and arts for over a decade. As the child of Cambodian refugees, she is drawn to themes surrounding immigration, cultural identity and family ties. She is currently working on her debut memoir and is an alum of Tin House’s 2025 winter writers workshop.

Creative Nonfiction

Jasmine Desiree is an L.A.–based writer and editor who writes about beauty, culture, and mythology woven into California life. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Domino, Coveteur, and HuffPost. She’s currently writing her first book, with the working title “Without Wax,” a memoir-in-essays about loss, identity, and renewal.

Creative Nonfiction

Abrigul Safar: I am an emerging writer, immigrant, mother, and Pamiri woman whose work intertwines personal history with the voices of an often-overlooked part of the world. I am driven to share stories of those who preserve their identity amid harsh conditions and systemic challenges, illuminating lives lived in the world’s lesser-known corners. I believe diversity reveals the world’s richest truths, so I strive to move beyond the black-and-white lens of a rapidly interconnected world. My writing explores unspoken social, political, and environmental issues—particularly in post-Soviet contexts—challenging silence. By uncovering both shared humanity and distinct perspectives, I hope to invite readers to recognize the commonalities that unite us, as well as the resilience that shapes us.

Fiction

Ansuya Nathan trained as an actor at NIDA at the turn of the century and has since studied and worked in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and now, the United States. Some of her favorite roles include making it out alive with Dev Patel in Hotel Mumbai and playing Jamie Dornan’s negligent nurse in HBO/BBC’s The Tourist. In 2021, she was part of the inaugural SBS Emerging Writer’s Incubator – an Australian network TV diversity initiative – and was given a year’s placement with Closer Productions as development intern. She was the writers’ and director’s assistant for season two of Aftertaste, a researcher for the documentary The Defenders and was involved in Sophie Hyde’s feature development process for Jimpa as well as assistant in mini rooms for multiple TV projects in early development. Ansuya is currently adapting her Edinburgh Stage Award nominated solo show Long Live the King into a novel with the support of Anaphora Literary Arts and an Arts SA grant. It’s a magical realist take on her parents’ migration to Australia tied in with the death of Elvis Presley.

Poetry

Ashley Hockney is a fiction writer, poet, and sometimes creative technologist who grew up in the rural Midwest and spent ten years working at the forefront of technology and the future of work. Her practice investigates emerging technologies, power, and gender through multimedia storytelling. Her work’s been published by the Zabludowicz Collection and noted by Glimmer Train. She now resides in Los Angeles.