Author Biographies
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Jesse Andrews is a New York Times-bestselling novelist and screenwriter currently living in Oakland, California. His books include Munmun, The Haters, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl; his produced screenplays include Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), an adaptation of his own book that won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and Every Day (2018), based on the book by David Levithan.
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Judy Bebelaar taught in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years. Her students won many prizes, some on the national level, for their writing. A calendar she and her students produced won national recognition as well. She is a founder of Opportunity I and II, public alternative schools, and a Teacher Consultant with UC Berkeley’s Bay Area Writing Project. Her award-winning poetry has been published widely. And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown is about the Temple students she and Ron Cabral came to know at Opportunity II in 1976.
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Ron Cabral, a native of San Francisco, entered teaching in the San Francisco Unified School District in 1965 and became a Middle School principal in 1992. He served 35 years in that capacity, finally retiring in 2002. Ron met Judy Bebelaar, a fellow teacher, in 1969 at Opportunity I, where he taught Urban Problems, Music Appreciation, Journalism, Drugs and Society, and Radio Production. He also managed and coached the school baseball team. He later transferred to Wilson High School in 1978. Ron is married with three grown children and five grandsons. He lives in Contra Costa County.
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Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the "boat people" wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for a 2018 American Book Award, UCLA's Common Book for 2017, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics, and made several best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates' top five picks. She also won a Caldecott Honor for illustrating the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.
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Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and received her MA in creative and life writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in Milpitas, California. AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART is her first novel.
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May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation. Her latest book, Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, won the Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (judged by novelist Tayari Jones). Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
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Jade Chang is the author of The Wangs vs. the World, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The Wangs has been named a New York Times Editors Choice as well as a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Buzzfeed, Elle, and NPR, and was awarded the VCU/Cabell First Novelist prize. The novel will be published in 12 countries and NPR said this: "Her book is unrelentingly fun, but it is also raw and profane—a story of fierce pride, fierce anger, and even fiercer love."
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Jeff Chang. He has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He has written for The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, and Buzzfeed, among many others.
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree is an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
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Dave Eggers is the author of many books, including The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, What is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Lifters. He is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a humor website, and a journal of new writing, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. In 2018, Eggers co-founded The International Congress of Youth Voices, an annual gathering of 100 extraordinary young writers and activists; their landmark meeting in San Francisco resulted in a youth-written manifesto published by The Guardian.
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Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.
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Amy Freed is an American playwright. Her play Freedomland was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Her work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Repertory, American Conservatory Theater, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and other theaters around the US. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University.
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Marcus Gardley. He is an American poet and playwright from West Oakland, California. He is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and an assistant professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University.
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James W. Haas is an author, attorney, and expert on San Francisco’s Civic Center history and politics. He has lived in San Francisco most of his life and spent more than forty years engaged in civic projects, including the restoration and completion of San Francisco’s Civic Center.
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Mary Ellen Hannibal's writing includes regular contributions to Bay Nature Magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, she has contributed to The New York Times, Esquire, Elle, Yoga Journal, Livestrong, and Nautilus, among many other publications. Involved for decades with environmental nonprofits, she also writes for the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
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Dan Hoyle is an actor and writer based in Oakland, CA. His brand of journalistic theater has been hailed as "riveting, funny and poignant" (New York Times) and "hilarious, moving and very necessary" (Salon).
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Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
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Laleh Khadivi is the author of the Kurdish trilogy and various short stories, journalism and documentary films. Her work has earned numerous awards and she is busy considering the role of the artist on a planet of 7.6 billion people. She lives in Berkeley and teaches on the MFA faculty at USF.
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Rachel Khong is a writer living in the Mission in San Francisco. She's the author of the novel Goodbye, Vitamin, which was released by Henry Holt in 2017, and recently in paperback by Picador. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Tin House, and The Paris Review. She is the founder of The Ruby, also located in the Mission, a shared work and gathering space for women of all definitions.
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R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Born in South Korea, she’s mostly lived in the United States.
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Samin Nosrat is cook, teacher, and author of the James Beard Award-winning New York Times Bestseller Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. She is an Eat columnist at The New York Times Magazine and the creator, host, and an executive producer of the Netflix original documentary series based on her book.
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Wendy MacNaughton is a NYT best-selling illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. She has written and illustrated several books and is the back page columnist for California Sunday Magazine and co-founder of Women Who Draw.
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Joshua Mohr is the author of five novels, including “Damascus,” which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written “Fight Song” and “Some Things that Meant the World to Me,” one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as “Termite Parade,” an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel “All This Life” won the Northern California Book Award. His first book of nonfiction, a memoir called “Sirens,” was published last year.
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Nayomi Munaweera is the award-winning author of the novels, Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.” The New York Times Book Review called her writing, “incandescent.” Munaweera is also widely anthologized in collections such as Good Girls Marry Doctors; South Asian-American Women on Obedience and Rebellion, Oakland Noir, Many Roads Through Paradise, Write to Reconcile Anthologies I and III and All the Women in My Family Sing. She has work forthcoming in the The Robert Wood Johnston Foundation’s Collection on the Culture of Health and the Anthology, What I Don’t Talk About With My Mother, (2019, Simon and Schuster). Munaweera has been named one of “Twelve Women of Color Writers You Need to Know” by Bustle Magazine and “One of the Asian American Women Writers Who are Going to Change the World” by Electric Literature. KQED named her a Woman to Watch in their Bay Brilliant series and she has been featured in Vogue India. Munaweera is currently the Lurie Visiting Writer at San Jose State, a position first held by Ursula K LeGuin in 2000. She lives in Oakland and is deep into the workings of her third novel.
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Achy Obejas is the author of The Tower of the Antilles, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her other books include Ruins and Days of Awe. As a translator, she's worked with Wendy Guerra, Rita Indiana, Junot Díaz, and Megan Maxwell, among others. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.
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Anne Raeff's short story collection, The Jungle Around Us, won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was a finalist for the California Book Award and named one of the 100 Best Books of 2016 by San Francisco Chronicle. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among other places. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.
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Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty-six works of fiction, history and memoir including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT and Stanford and a host and correspondent for documentaries on American public television. His most recent book is Energy: A Human History.
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Caitlin Rosenthal studies the history of data practices, information technologies, and labor management. Her first book, Accounting for Slavery, explores the business history of plantation slavery, using this history as a window into the relationship between violence and innovation. Caitlin is assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley where she teaches classes on the emergence of capitalism, the development of quantitative research, and the history of slavery. Before beginning her career as a historian, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an experience that continues to shape her research and teaching.
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Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Her recent novel, Lucky Boy, was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. She's a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and teaches writing at Mills College.
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Randy Shaw is the Director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, San Francisco’s leading provider of housing for homeless single adults. Shaw’s Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America reflects four decades on the frontlines of the housing crisis. Shaw’s prior books include The Activist’s Handbook, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, and The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. Shaw helped create the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District and is the founder of the Tenderloin Museum and editor of BeyondChron.org.
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Kim Shuck is a contemplative long protein that was produced and grown in San Francisco. She holds an MFA in textiles from San Francisco State University, is prone to holding forth with little invitation or notice in random classrooms and in erratic moments. She's been doing that classroom thing since third grade when she organized a crochet club for fellow students, having been inspired by Ruth Asawa's Alvarado Arts Project. Shuck is of the opinion that poetry is not a choice but something hardwired in her psyche. She is widely published, most recently in Forum Magazine, the student run publication out of the City College of San Francisco. Such has three full length solo books and one chapbook. She is also the current and seventh Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
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Dashka Slater is the author of nine books for children and adults, including the acclaimed 2017 releases "The Antlered Ship," "Escargot," and "The 57 Bus." Her book "Dangerously Ever After" is currently being made into an animated film by Fantasiation Studios. A recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Slater is also an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in such publications as Newsweek, Salon, The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones.
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T.J. Stiles is the author most recently of “Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America,” winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Spur Award for Best Western Biography, and the William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, and the California Book Award.
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DANIELLE TELLER received her medical training at McGill
University, Brown University and Yale University. She has held faculty positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University, where she investigated the origins of chronic lung disease and taught in the medical intensive care unit. In 2013, Danielle quit her job to pursue her childhood dream of being a writer. She is the author of Sacred Cows: The Truth About Divorce and Marriage (Diversion 2014) and has written numerous columns for Quartz. She lives with her husband, Astro Teller, and their four children in Palo Alto, California. |
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Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of the novel, The Border of Paradise, which was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She received a 2018 Whiting Award, was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.
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Kathy Wang grew up in Northern California and holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two children.
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Recognized as a 2017 Most Influential Woman by the San Francisco Business Times, Mary Wardell-Ghirarduzzi brings a passion for creating more equitable, inclusive and caring campus climate and culture for all as USF's chief diversity officer (CDO). She is an executive leader skilled at building organizational capacity focused on learning and belonging with over 20 years’ experience in academic affairs, student life, community engagement, and equity and inclusion. Currently, she is the Vice Provost for Diversity and Community Engagement and an adjunct professor of organizations, communication, and leadership at the University of San Francisco.
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