Claire of the Sea Light

<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

It is the Calm and Silent Waters That Drown You: Edwidge Danticat's "Claire of the Sea Light"

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>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

Les Plesko, 1954 – 2013

Love by Drowning

The Sins of Fathers: C.E. Poverman’s Psychological Thriller

Mentors: Alison Leslie Gold

Annie Proulx Bird Cloud: A Memoir Scribner, January 2011. 256 pp.

Bird Cloud: A Memoir

Don't Fence Her In

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.
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