Current Students

New Students

Breadcrumb
Yana Billie-Chung
Luke Barats

Luke Barats is a SoCal-based writer/comedian for television and new media. He is a graduate of Gonzaga University.

Lisa Billington
Nancy Chung

Nancy currently resides in SoCal and suffers from carpal tunnel and bad posture from writing genre fiction, a side effect of an overactive imagination. When she's not holed up in her home office working her corporate day job or writing, she likes to explore the local area via carefully-curated-via-Yelp itineraries or shapeshifting into a potato to appreciate cinematic masterpieces from her living room with her family.


 

Michele Desoer
Michele Desoer 

Michele wrote her first play at age 7 which she also directed and starred in with two other cast members. Then, somehow, she ended up as a lawyer, primarily in Los Angeles where she did a lot of work in the entertainment industry. During COVID she had an epiphany, retired early, and decided to focus on her true love, creative (not legal) writing. She has started a mystery/thriller novel that takes place in southern Portugal where she splits her time. 

Michele obtained her undergraduate and law degrees at UC Berkeley. She has been taking writing courses through UC Berkeley and UCLA Extension over the past couple of years.

Eric Escanuelas
Betty Fall

Betty Fall is a writer, hobby artist, novice sewist, out-of-practice bassist, and over-eager media analyst currently residing in North Carolina. She recently graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a double major in English (Creative Writing) and Media (Narrative Filmmaking). As these areas of study may suggest, she strives to pursue storytelling in all of its various forms and takes inspiration from all sorts of media, hoping to create stories that suit their mediums as effectively as possible. Her favorite genres are horror and science fiction, and she is deeply fascinated by literature that plays with its own form in unexpected ways. 

 In her writing, Betty seeks to both celebrate and explore the nuances of human identity and self-realization under a genre lens, with a particular focus on the experiences of queer Black and brown people. More than anything, Betty is excited to learn all that she can and collaborate with other writers.

Evelyn Garcia
Evelyn Garcia

Evelyn N. Garcia has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Animation from California State University, Los Angeles. She wants to improve her writing, so she can illustrate and publish her stories.

B.R. LaPlant
Audra Glatstein

Audra Glatstein was born and raised amongst the farmland in California’s Central Valley. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from California State University of Fresno in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She currently lives in Fresno, California.

Pallas Gutierrez
Pallas Gutierrez

Pallas Gutierrez is a writer of all genres, telling stories that play with non-linear time and explore how people change without noticing. They grew up in New York City and completed a BA in Theatre at Northwestern University. They are a Teaching Artist for the New Victory Theatre and a Broadway stagehand. Outside of writing and work, Pallas can almost always be found with yarn in hand and a book to recommend.

Bruce Hartzell
Bruce Hartzell

Bruce is a copywriter and publicist living in Los Angeles. He graduated with a degree in Communications from UCLA and has studied creative writing at UCLA Extension, Santa Monica College, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer graduate program, the Kenyon Review Novel Workshop, and the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference.

Solomon Moore
Maureen Howard

Maureen works with UW students in Seattle advancing social justice in and out of the courtroom. She has been lucky to teach all over the U.S. and internationally from Nairobi to Hong Kong. Maureen holds an Irish passport and has never met a potato she didn’t love. She’s a sucker for small town parades, off-Broadway theater, and Laura Pausini songs. And contrary to the incessant clammer on the internet, she doesn’t think Dan Brown is a wretched writer at all.

Eric Martin
Eric Martin

Eric Martin is a writer, artist, and college instructor living in California’s Antelope Valley. His writing has appeared in It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: Sexe, drogues, et sagesse du rock, The Write Launch, Steinbeck Now, and elsewhere. His favorite writers use narrative fiction in ways that understand the novel as more than storytelling, crafting texts that jump the bounds of the personal and literal, using stories to discover larger possibilities. He is excited to be part of a community of writers, thinkers, and creatives.

 

Cambria Matlow
Cambria Matlow

Cambria Matlow is a film director, writer and editor based in Portland, OR. In moody storyworlds that disrupt and discomfort, Matlow uses the mirror of nature to illuminate fractured identities, broken systems and complicated relationships. 

Matlow is an IFP Documentary Lab Fellow, Southern Circuit Tour Fellow and winner of Oregon Film + Playa’s Screenwriting Award. Her Jury and Audience award-winning documentaries No More Dope Parties, Woodsriderand Burning In the Sun have been selected for IFP’s Independent Film Week, broadcast on Al Jazeera and PBS, released through distributors Cinema Libre, Bullfrog Films and Uncorked Entertainment, and screened in festivals and cinemas worldwide including New York’s Lincoln Center and Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival.

Her films have been described as “hauntingly beautiful” by Willamette Week and ”relaxing and contemplative” by the Los Angeles Times. Matlow’s latest work Why Dig When You Can Pluck marks her narrative debut as writer/director and premieres in competition at BAFICI.

Isaiah Mustafa
Isaiah Mustafa

Isaiah Mustafa is a die hard LA Kings fan, who is also a versatile actor, director, writer, and spokesperson.

Shannon Presby
Jessica Ribera

Jessica lives in Seattle with her husband, four children, two dogs, and one oddball chicken. After beginning adulthood as a professional dancer at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, she suffered a career-ending accident on stage. She then graduated from the University of Washington Foster School of Business and has spent fifteen years supporting and guiding nonprofit organizations such as Bell Tower Counseling and Sixth Day Dance. Her memoir of ballet life, loss, and spirituality—The Almost Dancer—was published by White Blackbird Books in 2019. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in ScaryMommy, Red Tricycle, The Mighty, Fathom Magazine, The Brevity Nonfiction Blog, and more. A four-time Moth StorySlam winner, Jessica has been featured on The Moth podcast and competes now at the GrandSlam level. Hoping to find her way back into a full-time artistic career, she is eager to continue growing as a fiction writer in the UCR community.

Theo Skinner
Theo Skinner

Theo Skinner is a writer and feminist/LGBTQ+ rights activist from Orlando, Florida. He has been writing stories since he was a little kid, and recently graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. Theo has a passion for horror, thriller, and Southern Gothic stories. In his writing, he draws inspiration from Southern small towns and his experiences growing up as a queer person in a high-control religion. He also occasionally dabbles in political non-fiction, with some of his essays featured in local leftist zines.

Bucky Sinister
Bucky Sinister

Bucky Sinister is the author of four books of poetry, two self-help books, a novel, and a short memoir. He came up in the Bay Area arts scene, where he performed poetry regularly at punk shows and bars and produced a reading series that ran for seven years. He lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and their two dogs.

TJ Tranchell
T.J. Tranchell

T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween, grew up in Utah, and now lives in Washington state. His first hob was chasing people with a chainsaw in a haunted forest. He self-publishes under the imprint Last Days Books. CRY DOWN DARK, his first book, was named the scariest book set in Utah by the New York Times. In April 2022, he had an article on the two prequels to The Exorcist published in Fangoria.

In addition to writing, he is an adjunct instructor in the English Department at Columbia Basin College and holds a Master of Arts in Literature from Central Washington University. His wife and son agreed that joining the Palm Desert Low Residency MFA was a good idea, so he has that going for him.