<h4>John Francis Rechy is an American author. He is the recipient of PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and The Publishing Triangle’s William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature, Rechy is the author of over a dozen novels, nonfiction books, and plays, and has written essays for The Nation, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Saturday Review, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News, London Magazine, Evergreen Review, New York Magazine, The Advocate, Mother Jones, Premiere, and many other national publications.</h4>

John Rechy

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

Lisa See is an American novelist and writer. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior(1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), Dreams of Joy (2011), and China Dolls (2014). She is the daughter of novelist and critic Carolyn See and lives in Los Angeles.

Lisa See

<h4>Susan Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Between Heaven and Here.</h4>

Susan Straight

Ron Charles is a book critic at The Washington Post.

Ron Charles

Laurence Goldstein is the author of Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City (University of Michigan Press, 2014), For 32 years (1977-2009) he served as editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Laurence Goldstein

<h4>Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal. He is the author of, most recently, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright).</h4>

Jonathan Kirsch

In Memoriam: Carolyn See

<h4 class="normal">Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin&rsquo;s Free University. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, NM, where he teaches Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.</h4>

Stefan Kiesbye

<h4 class="normal">Toby Barlow is a writer who lives in downtown Detroit. He is the author of&nbsp; the critically acclaimed novel Sharp Teeth. </h4>

Toby Barlow

<h4>Block is a Los Angeles writer of over 32 novels, including&nbsp;Weetzie Bat,&nbsp;The Rose and the Beast, The Hanged Man, Wasteland, I Was a Teenage Fairy,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Pink Smog.&nbsp;She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious&nbsp;Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, and her work has been translated into many languages. Her latest novel,&nbsp;The Elementals, published by St. Martin's Press, is available now.</h4>

Francesca Lia Block

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, the Paris Review, Tin House, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has recently been at work adapting American Dream Machine for FX Networks. Photo by Lisa Jane Persky.

Matthew Specktor

Halloween Fiction Roundtable

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

Fiction

Joan Didion Blue Nights Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Blue Nights

The Baby

Susan Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Between Heaven and Here.