Ways of Walking: Essays

<h4>Janet Fitch is a Los Angeles native and the author of&nbsp;White Oleander&nbsp;and&nbsp;Paint It Black. Her latest novel is a two-part epic, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.</h4>

Janet Fitch

What It Means to Wander

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Creating Anna Karenina

Between Irritation and Oyster: On Bob Blaisdell’s “Creating Anna Karenina”

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

Willis Peter Bilderback earned his PhD from the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and is the author of The Caveman and the Machine: An Analysis of the American Musical Film, 1929–1935 (2009).

Willis Peter Bilderback

Jeff Turrentine is an&nbsp;environmental journalist based in&nbsp;Brooklyn, NY.

Jeff Turrentine

Robert George

Alissa Quart

Tim Appelo

Tony Ortega

Bill Holdship

Andy Hermann

Charles McNulty is a writer and critic in Los Angeles.

Charles McNulty

Richard Thompson

Stanton Hall

Dean Kuipers writes on the environment, art and politics and is the author of the new memoir, The Deer Camp. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Dean Kuipers

Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown. Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently <a href="http://danagioia.com/book/99-poems-new-selected/">99 Poems: New &amp; Selected</a>. His poetry collection, <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/interrogations-at-noon/">Interrogations at Noon</a>, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/can-poetry-matter-essays-on-poetry-and-american-culture/">Can Poetry Matter?</a>, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry. Gioia’s many literary anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, and Literature for Life. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written three opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown.

Dana Gioia

Photo by Aaron Salcido

Lynell George is a Los Angeles based journalist and essayist. Currently an arts and culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound, she has had a long career in LA journalism as staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly — focusing on social issues, human behavior and identity politics as well as visual arts, music and literature. She has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University and is also a Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow (2013). She is also the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday), a collection of features and essays drawn from her reporting.

Lynell George

Joe Donnelly, an award-winning journalist and short-story writer, is currently Assistant Visiting Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Joe Donnelly

<h4>Tom Zoellner is the author of five nonfiction books, including Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling book An Ordinary Man, and his book Uranium won the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Time, Foreign Policy, Departures, The Wall Street Journal, Men’s Health, the Oxford American, and many other places. A professor of English at Chapman University, he lives in Downtown Los Angeles.</h4>

Tom Zoellner

<h4>Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is editor-at-large for Yale University Press.</h4>

Steve Wasserman

<h4>Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His latest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire.</h4>

Ted Gioia

Remembering Scott Timberg

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

Laurus

The Russian Soul: Janet Fitch on Eugene Vodolazkin

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Rochelle Low

<h4>Nancy Spiller is the Los Angeles–based author of Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes) (Counterpoint, 2009) and Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box (Counterpoint, 2013). She is also an artist, recovering journalist, and instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. For more information please visit <a href="http://www.nancyspiller.org">www.nancyspiller.org</a>. Twitter handle: @nancyspiller.</h4>

Nancy Spiller

Lola Willoughby

Julianne Cohen

Joshua John Miller

Mary Rakow

<h4>Samantha Dunn works as a feature writer at the Orange County Register, and is the author of the novel Failing Paris and the memoirs Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life and Faith in Carlos Gomez. Her essays are widely anthologized, including in the collection she co-edited, Women on the Edge: Writing from Los Angeles. She has written for O the Oprah Magazine, Ms., Glamour, and Salon, among many other national publications. She teaches in the UCLA Writers Program and at Idyllwild Arts Academy.</h4>
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Samantha Dunn

<h4>David Francis’s first novel Agapanthus Tango was published in the US as The Great Inland Sea. His second novel, Stray Dog Winter, was the Australian Literature Review’s Novel of the Year, and won the 2010 American Library Association Stonewall Prize for Literature. For more information, go to <a href="http://www.straydogwinter.com/">www.straydogwinter.com</a>.</h4>

David Francis

<h4>Rita Williams's work has appeared in Best Food Writing for 2007, Los Angeles Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, O at Home, Saveur, The Utne Reader and Fins and Feathers. She is currently teaching in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. If the Creek Don't Rise is her first book.</h4>
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Rita Williams

Les Plesko, 1954 – 2013

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.

Seth Greenland

Aimee Bender

<h4>Paul Mandelbaum teaches the literature of Los Angeles at Emerson College’s L.A. Center. His books include the novels Garrett in Wedlock and Adriane on the Edge and the anthology 12 Short Stories and Their Making.</h4>

Paul Mandelbaum

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of four novels, including&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/the-moors-account/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Moor’s Account</a>, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel,&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/the-other-americans/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Other Americans</a>, was a national best seller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the&nbsp;Washington Post,&nbsp;The Nation,&nbsp;Harper’s, the&nbsp;Guardian, and the&nbsp;New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a full professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, a work of nonfiction called&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/conditional-citizens/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Conditional Citizens</a>, was published by Pantheon in September 2020.&nbsp;

Laila Lalami

VIDEO:  The Question of Nonfiction

Michael Cunningham By Nightfall Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 256 pp.

By Nightfall

The Middle Years: Michael Cunningham's "By Nightfall"

Janet Fitch is a Los Angeles native and the author of&nbsp;White Oleander&nbsp;and&nbsp;Paint It Black. Her latest novel is a two-part epic, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.