Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.
Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.
Aimee Phan is a Vietnamese-American author. She was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first novel, We Should Never Meet, was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian among other publications. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She worked as an assistant professor in English at Washington State University from fall 2005 to summer 2007, and now teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California and resides in Berkeley, California with her husband and two kids.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Fae Myenne Ng is an American novelist, and short story writer.
Jonah Raskin is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a freelance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. He retired from his teaching position in 2011.
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Barthold "Bart" Fles was a Dutch-American literary agent, author, translator, editor and publisher. Among his many clients were Elias Canetti, Raymond Loewy, Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth, Felix Salten, Ignazio Silone, Bruno Walter and Arnold Zweig.
Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society.
Jane Vandenburgh is an American novelist and memoirist.
Thomas Centolella is an American poet and educator. He has published four books of poetry and has had many poems published in periodicals including American Poetry Review. He has received awards for his poetry including those from the National poetry Series, the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Dorset Prize. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cecile Pineda was an American author. Her novels have won numerous awards including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1986 for Face, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Kathi Kamen Goldmark was an American author, columnist, publishing consultant, radio and music producer, songwriter, and musician. Goldmark was the author of the novel And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You, co-authored or contributed to numerous other books, wrote a monthly column for BookPage with her husband, author and musician Sam Barry and produced the radio show West Coast Live. She was a member of the San Francisco band Los Train Wreck, and founding member of the all-author rock band the Rock Bottom Remainders. As President of "Don't Quit Your Day Job" Productions inc., she supervised the production of ten music and spoken-word CDs.
Leslie Schwartz is an American author and teacher of creative writing. She has published two novels, Jumping the Green and Angels Crest, the latter of which was made into a 2011 film, and The Lost Chapters, a memoir of her time in jail while recovering from alcoholism.
Marvin X is a poet, playwright and essayist.
Gary Byrdelle Amdahl is an American author, born August 4, 1956, in Jackson, Minnesota. He attended public schools, graduating from Robbinsdale High School in 1974.
Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, a novel inspired by the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran's notorious woman poet, and The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, which became a New York Times bestseller. A New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Song of a Captive Bird was praised by The New York Times as a "complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out." The Bohemians was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the best historical novels of 2021. Darznik's books have been published in seventeen countries.
