Creative Nonfiction

Kalamazoo, Michigan native Shonda Buchanan is a twice Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominee, Oxfam Ambassador & a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and PEN Mentor. A professor at Loyola Marymount University & Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda is the author of three collections of poetry: Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise, Poems from Goddess Country and the forthcoming, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, as well as the award-winning memoir, Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism.” Board President for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Shonda has published in The Mississippi Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today & Red Ink Journal and freelanced for Indian Country Today, Los Angeles Times AARP, and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, The Writer’s Chronicle.

Shonda’s forthcoming essay collection, Children of the Mixed Blood Trail, explores mixed-race migration in America. She is currently shopping a Black Lives Matter book of poetry, America’s Bloodflowers: Poems, as well as Artificial Earth: Poems and Essays, poems about the first founding mixed race “settlers” of Los Angeles and California Indians.

Poetry

Nancy Lynée Woo is an eco-centric poet based in southern California who harbors a wild love for the natural world. She has released a full-length poetry book entitled I’d Rather Be Lightning (Gasher Press, 2023), as well as two chapbooks. Nancy has received fellowships from PEN America Emerging Voices, California Creative Corps, Artists at Work, Arts Council for Long Beach, Plympton Writing Downtown Las Vegas, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Nancy currently serves as the Long Beach Youth Poet Laureate Fellow, supporting and mentoring a cohort of talented teen poets. She has an MFA from Antioch University and a BA in sociology and environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz. You can find her online at nancylyneewoo.com and on social media @fancifulnance.

Fiction

Charmaine Craig is the author of the novels My Nemesis (Grove Press, February 2023); Miss Burma, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction; and The Good Men, a national bestseller. Her writing has been published in a dozen languages and appeared in venues including The New York Times Magazine, Narrative Magazine, AFAR Magazine, and Dissent. Formerly an actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard College, received her MFA from the University of California at Irvine, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Fiction

Rebecca Paredes (she/her) is a writer based in Big Bear Lake, California. Much of her work is inspired by her hometown, Lake Elsinore, where the IHOP is located next to the graveyard. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Epiphany Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Barren Magazine, and other publications. She holds degrees in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and Texas Tech University. Currently, she is working on a novel.

Creative Nonfiction

Nicole Diamond Austin (she/her) is a lifelong lover of books and storytelling in all forms. After graduating from Yale University, Austin spent six years working in the publishing industry before shifting careers, receiving an MBA from UCLA Anderson. She went on to work in entertainment marketing for over a decade before leaving the corporate world to pursue writing in earnest. In her fiction, Austin is passionate about examining untold or misunderstood voices from the past. Her in-progress memoir, Desirous of Everything, explores her own search for health and wholeness along three separate trajectories of her life: her precocious adolescence, her spiritual awakening, and her ongoing battle with invisible illness.

Creative Nonfiction

Yvonne Liu (she/her) is a Chinese-American writer and mental health advocate based in Los Angeles. Her work on Asian American experiences, mental health, and adoption has appeared in the New York Times, The Rumpus, NBC News, and elsewhere. Her HuffPost adoptee essay reached over three million readers. She received financial support from Bread Loaf Writers and is a Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Yale workshop alumna. Yvonne is working on her memoir “I Talk to My Mother in the Clouds.” She was featured on the NYT Modern Love podcast and serves as a volunteer ambassador for The Op-Ed Project. She is passionate about sharing her story so that others who were silenced will know they are not alone.

Fiction

A fourth-generation oral storyteller, KC Lehman (she/her), is a fiction writer who enjoys music, mysteries, and the rare luxury of a midday nap. She passionately defends the rich culture of her hometown, Los Angeles, CA, no matter what others may say. When not introducing her kids to 90’s music or selling LA real estate, KC chats with the characters that live in her head until she gets them on the page. A graduate of UCLA, KC has been a writing fellow with Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc, and The Hurston/Wright Foundation. Her writing has also landed her placement in several writer’s workshops, including Tin House, Lighthouse Writers, and Kenyon Review.

Fiction

M. Anne Kala’i (she/her) is a graduate of Vassar College’s creative writing program and a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Women Who Submit. Her poetry has been published in the San Pedro River Review. Her fiction has been published in Halfway Down the Stairs and was shortlisted for the 2024 Cheshire Novel Prize.

Fiction

Lane Michael Stanley (he/they) is a transgender writer and filmmaker whose work explores queerness, class, restorative justice, grief, and healing. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Brevity, and HowlRound. Lane’s films and plays have been presented by 31 film festivals and 20 theaters in 22 states and four countries, and shown in soup kitchens, meditations gardens, addiction treatment centers, and San Quentin State Prison. He holds an MFA from UT Austin. Lane is currently hard at work on a novel and a memoir, both of which explore the healing and liberatory powers of BDSM. www.lanemichaelstanley.com.

Creative Nonfiction

Audrey Shipp’s (she/her) writing has appeared in various journals, including Panorama Journal, Crayon Magazine, Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, LitroUSA, A Long House, A Gathering Together, and Américas Review. She has both a B.A. in English and M.Ed from UCLA, an M.A. in English from Cal State LA, and a Certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension. Her professional life has been dedicated to teaching English at middle, high, and adult school levels in Los Angeles. She is working on a memoir about writing and (un)writing in Los Angeles

Poetry

Uchechi Kalu (she/her) is a Nigerian-American writer based in Los Angeles. Having lived and worked on six continents, her work explores how her relationship to Blackness, Americanness, and Africanness transmutes as her body moves around the globe. She served as a Poetry Fellow for the 2024 Paris Olympics, and is currently working on her first chapbook, which explores the lost history of the Biafran War. When she’s not writing, she works as a financial planner. She’d love to give you tax advice and tell you how to invest your 401k.

Creative Nonfiction

LiXin (Jessica Winkler) (she/her), who writes under her Chinese name, is a memoirist whose work explores love, ambiguous loss, rituals of grief, and Buddhist practices to transmute suffering. Her interest in these themes stems from her early work in human rights, in which she interviewed Holocaust survivors and their families as well as displaced peoples across France, Jordan, Nepal, and Chile. She is currently writing a memoir, The Bird Between Us, a lyrical record of four generations of women in her family. The work tracks a shared dream that persisted across her family’s persecution in 20th-century revolutionary China to her mother’s prison labor in California’s carceral Fire Camps. She is an award-nominated researcher of oral history, a 2023 Tin House Workshop alumna, a 2024 Periplus Fellow, and a 2024 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.

She can be found at lixinwrites.com, on Instagram @lixin.writes, and Twitter/X @LixinWrites.

Poetry

Shelby May (she/they) is a poet born and based in Los Angeles, CA. She spends the majority of her time thinking about how she could find a way to explain larger world concepts into bite-size poems. As a perpetual student of the craft, she’s been able to sharpen her skills by attending conferences like Breadloaf’s Environmental Writers Conference and Kenyon’s Adult Writers Workshop, or by attending classes at institutions like Grubstreet Lighthouse Writers, Hugo House, etc. Currently, she is choosing to spend her time as a tutor for elementary school children.

Poetry

Amanda Vandenberg (she/her) is a Latinx writer exploring themes of ritual, memory, and cultural inheritance. She has worked as an editor and curator and serves as a communications lead for public awareness campaigns. Amanda holds a fine art degree from Yale University and is passionate about accessible, democratic art as inspiration and advocacy. Based in California, she is currently at work on her first collection of poetry.

Creative Nonfiction

Ruth Rudnick (she/her) is an actor, writer, and teacher who has worked in film, television, theater and memoir. Best known for her role as Nurse Wanda in While You Were Sleeping, Ruth is an alumna of The Second City, Chicago, where for nine years she wrote and performed in over a dozen productions. Ruth’s television credits include NCIS and Curb Your Enthusiasm. She began her career in morning drive radio at WZOU Boston, where she was part of the Boston Morning Zoo team, laughing for a living.

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Ruth more recently earned a Certificate with Distinction in Creative Nonfiction from UCLA Extension, where she was nominated twice for the Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir and named a top-three finalist. Ruth was chosen for the ASCAP Lester Sill Songwriting Workshop as a lyricist.

Ruth’s essay “Cake Drunk” was published in Psychology Today, and her work appears in Barbara Abercrombie’s book Kicking in the Wall. Ruth also teaches improv to kids and teens and founded Lead with Your Art, which provides art supplies and instruction to those with limited access.

Poetry

Lindsay Young (she/they) is a first generation Jamaican-American poet from New York, based in Southern California. She is the author of Salt to Taste, her debut book of poetry published in the Summer of 2019. They are a Winter Tangerine alumnus, a 2020 Watering Hole fellow, and a two time 2021 Best of the Net nominee. Their work has been published in The Offing Magazine, The Amistad, The Hellebore, and elsewhere. Their manuscript titled In Your Absence was the winner of the 3rd Annual Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, published in 2021. Young currently works as a practicing psychotherapist after graduating with her MSW from Columbia University, and continues to forge into new creative mediums.

Fiction

Sophie Hamel (she/her) is a French writer. She is a 2024 PEN/Robert J. DAU nominee for her short story, “Treasure,” published in The Summerset Review. Her debut novel, UNEARTHED, is currently being reviewed by agents.

A former archaeologist with a master’s degree from La Sorbonne, and a postgraduate diploma from the Institute of Higher Studies in Art (IESA), Paris, she participated in numerous excavation campaigns in France and the Middle East, took a dive into the Indian contemporary art world while in Bangalore, before becoming a faculty manager for an online art school in Los Angeles.

She is a reader for the Adroit Journal and a member of Women Who Submit. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

https://www.sophie-hamel.com/