Carribean Fragoza is an artist and writer from South El Monte. After graduating from UCLA, Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts, where she worked with writers Douglas Kearney…
Born in Virginia, raised in Maryland, Randee Dawn is now based in Brooklyn, working as an entertainment journalist. But after many years of toil and labor and not a small amount of luck, her humorous…
Olivia Waite writes queer science fiction, fantasy, historical romance, and essays. She is the romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Her latest novella is Murder By Memory and…
Orlando Ortega-Medina was born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrants. He studied English Literature at UCLA and holds a Juris Doctor from Southwestern University School of Law. Ortega-Medina is the…
Anthony Horowitz is one of the UK's most prolific and successful writers, unique in being active in both adult and YA fiction, TV, theater, and journalism. Several of his previous novels were instant…
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath, a Locus Award and Dragon Award finalist, the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an…
Michael Seth Starr covered television at the New York Post as a reporter, columnist, critic, and editor for over 28 years. He has written a filmography of Peter Sellers and biographies of Don Rickles…
Erin Crosby Eckstine is an author of speculative historical fiction, personal essays, and anything else she's in the mood for. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Eckstine grew up between the South and Los…
Former library school lecturer and public librarian Cindy Mediavilla is currently an author and independent scholar who retired from both the California State Library and the UCLA Department of…
Kate Maruyama was raised on books and weaned on movies in a small New England town. She is the author of The Collective, Harrowgate and Bleak Houses. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los…
As Wren Roland celebrates his 22nd birthday with his best friends and roommates, Mateo and Avery, he begins to lament the fact that he has never been kissed. He’s been close, but has yet to experience what his degree in film studies has convinced him will be a life-altering and...
Joan believes herself to be a typical teenager. She spends her summers in London visiting her maternal grandmother, while her father visits his family in Malaysia. During this visit, she has been volunteering at Holland House, a historic home and museum in Kensington. Holland House is where she met Nick...
In 2019, Kim Michele Richardson told the story of Cussy Mary Carter and her work as a Pack Horse Librarian in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Now, in 2022, Richardson returns to tell the next chapter in Cussy Mary’s story, which actually belongs to her daughter, in The Book...
A young woman on her way to her first day of classes at Brooklyn College spills coffee on herself just prior to boarding the subway. Another young woman on the train comes to her rescue with a scarf and a kind word. The next time the student boards the train...
Vodou priestess Mambo Reina Dumond learned the practices and customs of Vodou as a child from her father, while her family was living in Haiti. She is inhabited by the spirit of Erzulie, which makes her a gifted practitioner of water magic. Reina operates a small business behind her home...
The year is 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. is about to hold his Freedom Rally at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles; William H. Parker is Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department; John F. Kennedy is President of the United States; Pat Brown is the Governor of California; Gas is...
Meiko is the Japanese wife of Jamie Briggs, a white US Air Force pilot fighting in World War II. Meiko, and her daughter Aiko, are “residents” of the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. A few days ago, an unscheduled truck came to the camp. The residents are told to stay...
Mickey Barnes NEEDS to get off Midgard, the colony planet on which he has lived his entire life. Because staying on Midgard is not an option, he takes the only avenue open to him: he volunteers to be the “expendable” on Midgard’s first outgoing colony ship, the Drakkar. An “expendable”...
In 1975, the comic book industry is struggling. It has survived, mostly, Frederic Wertham’s criticisms and claims regarding a causal relationship between reading comics and becoming a juvenile delinquent in Seduction of the Innocent. But there have been casualties. Readership is down. Publishers are closing. Writers and artists are left...
N.K. Jemisin is a multiple award-winning, speculative fiction writer. Currently, she resides in Brooklyn, New York and, as evidenced by her novel, The City We Became, she LOVES the “Big Apple”.Every century or so, a city will “manifest”, it becomes a living thing, an entity of its own. This has...
