Subcommittees

Sean Bernard directs and teaches in the BA creative writing program at the University of La Verne in Southern California, where he also edits the national literary journal Prism Review. Since 2004, he has served as assistant editor of Toad Press, a publisher of chapbook-length translations, and in spring 2021 he became the fiction editor for Veliz Books. He is the author of the novel Studies in the Hereafter (Red Hen Press) and the story collection Desert sonorous (winner of the 2014 Juniper Prize), and his work has appeared in journals including The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse [now swamp pink], and EPOCH. He has received grants and fellowships from groups including the National Endowment for the Arts, Jentel Artists Foundation, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Poets & Writers.

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection, Sturge Tow (Peepal Tree Press, 2023), is a 2023 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice. Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific University MFA program and is the series editor of the African Poetry Book Series, director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction (Commander) by the Government of Jamaica.

Travis Kurowski is the editor of Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (Atticus Books, 2013), an Independent Publisher Book Award winner, and coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He has served on the mastheads of numerous magazines, including Story, winning a CLMP Firecracker Award. His writing has appeared in Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, and TriQuarterly, and he was a columnist for Poets & Writers. He is an associate professor at York College of Pennsylvania, where he directs the writing program. He received his PhD from The University of Southern Mississippi.

Michele Morano is the author of Like Love, which was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her essays have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Essays, Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, Brevity, and Rusted Radishes. She has received honors and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, MacDowell, and the American Association of University Women, among others. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches creative writing at DePaul University.

Neelanjana Banerjee is the managing editor of Kaya Press, an independent publishing house focused on innovative Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. She is also the coeditor of the poetry anthologies Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press) and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press). Her own writing appears widely in places like Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Harper’s BAZAAR, and The Texas Observer. She teaches Asian American literature, creative writing, and publishing at Loyola Marymount University, UCLA, and USC.

Esther G. Belin is the author of two poetry books and coeditor of The Diné Reader. She teaches in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department at Fort Lewis College and in the low-residency MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was raised in the Los Angeles area, where she learned to transplant and strengthen her Diné worldview with the help of her parents and the resilient Indian community that remains there. She is Tlógí born for Tó’dích'ii'nii and lives just east of the Dibé Ntsaa mountain range on the Colorado side of the four corners.

Photo credit: Carrie Phillips

Venita Blackburn is an award-winning author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017) and How to Wrestle a Girl (2021), as well as the debut novel Dead in Long Beach, California (2024). She is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Photo credit: Ginny Barnes

Shonda Buchanan, a native of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oxfam ambassador, and a PEN Emerging Voices fellow. A professor at Loyola Marymount University and Alma College’s MFA program in creative writing, Buchanan is the author of Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a top twenty book to read to learn about institutional racism. Board president for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Buchanan has published in Mississippi Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today [now ITC], and RED INK. Her forthcoming book is The Lost Songs of Nina Simone.

Photo credit: Denise Lovelace Photography

Eileen Cronin’s memoir Mermaid (W. W. Norton, 2015) has been translated into three foreign languages and was named one of the best memoirs of the year by O, The Oprah Magazine. She was awarded the Washington Writing Award for short fiction and a Los Angeles Press Club award, and was named a finalist in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society competition for the novel and novella. She has performed with The Moth and published in Bellevue Literary Review, Third Coast, Slice, and others. With two Pushcart nominations and a notable essay in The Best American Essays, Cronin has also been a Vermont Studio Center fellow, a writing instructor at UCLA Extension, and a featured presenter at the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair.

Photo credit: Daniel Reichert

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award nominee, and a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the John Leonard Prize. In 2023, Escoffery was named among thirty-six “forces shaping the cultural conversation” by Harper’s BAZAAR. He is the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction, an NEA fellowship, and the ASME Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Observer, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Jemimah Wei

Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen books, including the award-winning Gangsterland trilogy; The Low Desert, named Southwest Book of the Year; The House of Secrets, which he coauthored with Brad Meltzer; and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His nonfiction appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today and has been awarded five Nevada Press Association awards and included in The Best American Essays. Goldberg is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where he founded and directs the low-residency MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts.

Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Train to Agra, Afternoon Masala, and most recently, Burning Like Her Own Planet (Alice James Books, 2023). Her previous collections have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Contest, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.

Photo credit: Emily Petrie

Elline Lipkin is a poet, nonfiction writer, and academic. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her books include The Errant Thread, chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award, and Girls’ Studies, published by Seal Press. She affiliates with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley’s Beatrice Bain Research Group. A past mentor with AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, she is active with WriteGirl and writes for Ms. magazine. She has taught widely and served her community as poet laureate and editor of The Altadena Poetry Review.

Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of the acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Delgado Lopera is also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press, 2017) and the award-winning ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants. Delgado Lopera has received numerous fellowships and residencies, and their work has appeared in Granta, Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, and The Rumpus, among others. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions and a founder of Drag Queen Story Hour. They have been partnering with several organizations to curate Latinx history projects in San Francisco for over ten years. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Delgado Lopera currently resides in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Devlin Shand

Luivette Resto is an award-winning poet, a mother of three revolutionary humans, and a middle school English teacher. She was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, but proudly raised in the Bronx. She is a CantoMundo and Macondo fellow and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first two books of poetry, Unfinished Portrait and Ascension, were published by Tia Chucha Press. Her third poetry collection, Living on Islands Not Found on Maps, was published by FlowerSong Press in 2022. Her work has been mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, Ms. magazine, and The North American Review. She sits on the board for Women Who Submit, and she is the associate editor for Tia Chucha Press. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Reynaldo Macias

Guadalupe Robles (she/her) is a Southern California high school educator, poet, and translator. Robles translates from both English to Spanish and Spanish to English and has taught in both languages for the past seven years. Her translations include two poetry collections for Valparaíso Editions USA and informational texts for exhibits at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. She currently teaches composition and creative writing courses at a private high school.

Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ fourth poet laureate, and she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in 2022. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Beg No Pardon, Start with a Small Guitar, Fretwork, and most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, April 2024). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards, including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from Beyond Baroque, the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for poetry, and the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Common, and Gulf Coast, among others, as well as the anthologies Braving the Body, In the Tempered Dark, and Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa.

 Photo credit: Jacqueline Legazcue

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is an Iranian American author, teacher, and artist, and their work studies both infrastructures of power and ecological connection. They are the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a chapbook with Tram Editions, and their poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Mizna, Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter, The Rupture, and others. They have work forthcoming in Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week and Gulf Coast. Tigh has contributed work for a Gulf Coast and Texas Contemporary ekphrastic collaboration, and their work has also been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Brooklyn Rail, and others. Tigh lives and works in Houston, Texas.