We're excited to kick off our 27th MFA residency on June 3rd with this amazing line-up of guest faculty members comprised of top writers, industry professionals, and esteemed alums! It's going to be an amazing residency. If you're interested in visiting during the week, please contact us to set up a visit: palmdesertmfa@ucr.edu
Michelle Kholos Brooks is an award-winning playwright with productions staged internationally. Awards and distinctions include the Susan Glaspell Award for Hitler’s Tasters, the Reva Shiner Comedy Award for Kalamazoo, co-written by Kelly Younger. Hitler’s Tasters was also named ‘Best of Fringe’ at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by The Stage UK. The filmed stage version of Hitler’s Tasters was listed as a Must-Watch by the LA Times and selected for The Kilroys: The List 2020. Hostage was a finalist for the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, The Fratti-Newman Political Play Contest and a Showcase finalist for the National New Play Network. Chair received second place in the Firehouse Theatre Festival of New American Plays. Plays have been produced and/or developed at Arena Stage, the Skylight Theatre (World Premiere, Hostage) Centenary Stage (World Premiere, Hitler’s Tasters), Pacific Resident Theatre, Adirondack Theatre Festival, Bloomington Playwright’s Project (Rolling World Premiere, Kalamazoo), The Colony Theatre (World Premiere, Family Planning) Florida Repertory Theatre, Boston Court Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, Wordsmyth Theatre, The Barrow Group, Bay Street Theatre, Venue 9 Theatre, Wings Theatre, Laurel Grove Theatre Company, Drama West, Vox Humana Theatre Ensemble, iTheatre Collaborative, New Light Theatre Project, 59E59th St. Theatre, Olive Theatre; Greenside at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Adobe Rose Theatre, The Electric Lodge, Pendragon Theater, Guild Hall and off broadway at Theatre Row. Publications include Dramatists Play Service, Room literary magazine and The Daily Beast. Brooks earned a B.A. from Emerson College and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Otis College of Art and Design. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America, The Playwright’s Center and Pacific Resident Theatre. In addition, she is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of PRETTY THINGS, WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING and THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and her journalism has appeared in publications such as Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Self and The Los Angeles Times. She spent seven years as a staff writer at Salon and Wired during the first dot-com boom in San Francisco; and launched one of the very first Web zines for women, Maxi. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
Salvador Carrasco is a Mexican film director based in Santa Monica, California. He is the writer and director of the highly acclaimed and influential feature film The Other Conquest about the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Carrasco has won numerous film and academic awards, and is currently developing new film projects through his production company, Salvastian Pictures, based in Santa Monica, California, including film adaptations of stories by preeminent writers Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Stephen Graham Jones. The Other Conquest was selected by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as one of the Top Ten Films of 2000, and re-released theatrically by Alliance Atlantis in 2008, achieving a 90% score by Rotten Tomatoes’ top critics. Carrasco has taught directing at USC and the LA Film School, and screenwriting at Pomona College as the Moseley Fellow in Creative Writing. Carrasco is a tenured film professor at Santa Monica College, where he is founder and Head of the Film Production Program, featured in Variety magazine. Carrasco has been a guest film director at CinemadaMare in Italy, along with directors Margarethe von Trotta, Paolo Sorrentino, and Krzysztof Zanussi. His critical essays have been published by the Los Angeles Times, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and The Nation Books, among others.
Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYRB, Longreads, Paris Review online, and dozens other places. Her essay on food insecurity was published in Best American Food Writing 2019. She’s done extensive reporting on the child welfare system and appears in the Netflix docuseries The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is out now from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. She is a Ph.D. candidate at USC’s Creative Writing Program. Melissa is a worker lover and through her own work and literary citizenship strives to upend economic violence. Her mother taught her how to sharpen a pencil with a knife and she’s basically been doing that ever since.
Aaron Phillip Clark is a native of Los Angeles, CA. He is an ITW Thriller Award-nominated novelist and screenwriter. His most recent novel, UNDER COLOR OF LAW, is inspired by his experiences in the LAPD and was published by Thomas & Mercer on October 1, 2021. Clark's forthcoming novel, BLUE LIKE ME, will be published on November 8, 2022, and is the second installment in the Detective Trevor "Finn" Finnegan series. As a self-described "son of the city," Clark takes pleasure and finds inspiration in exploring the many facets of Los Angeles.
Carribean Fragoza is the author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, CA. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA program at the CalArts School of Critical Studies, where she worked with writers Douglas Kearney and Norman Klein. She is founder of Vicious Ladies, coeditor of the University of California Press’s acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and founder of the South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including BOMB, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the coeditor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published in February 2020 by Rutgers University Press and Romeo Guzmán, senior writer at Tropics of Meta. Fragoza is the coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards at Claremont Graduate University, and she lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County.
Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage. She is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men (Algonquin), which is currently under development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah, and Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint), which was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. Now the Creative Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gina brings more than two decades of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Dame, and in many other magazines and anthologies, and she writes a column, “Not the Norm,” for Psychology Today. She also runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with UCRPD professor Emily Rapp Black, and can be found at www.ginafrangello.org.
Jasper Grey is a Los Angeles based Manager and Producer who runs The Vendetta Group, an independent management company dedicated to championing emergent female and diverse voices in addition to an established roster of award-winning tv and film Writers and Directors. Jasper also represents production companies and financing entities that enable a holistic approach to development and production of content. With a penchant for darker themed material, Jasper is constantly on the look for tomorrow’s Cronenberg, Wachowski or Tarkovski. The team Jasper has built at The Vendetta Group has more than five decades of experience developing and producing some of the world’s biggest blockbusters including 300, V for Vendetta, and Safe House. The Vendetta Group also represents commercial productions companies that build branded content and animation for some of the largest companies in the world including Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, Ford and Marvel.
Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and author of five books including the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. She’s written for The New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Magazine and Hadassah amongst other publications. Her latest collection of essays You're Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility is a 2021 New York Times Favorite Book about Healthy Living and a Good Morning America must read.
Gurwitch was the longtime cohost of Dinner & a Movie on TBS and a regular commentator on NPR. She's performed on the Moth Mainstage, at Carolines on Broadway, and at arts centers around the country. Her acting credits include: Seinfeld, Murphy Brown, Boston Legal and Dexter and once in while she returns to acting playing a rabbi on Better Things on FX or a therapist for an FBI agent in Michael Bay’s upcoming Ambulance. She's been featured in Time Magazine’s annual “10 Ideas That are Changing the World” issue; her Los Angeles Times op-ed (included in her latest collection of essays) about hosting a housing insecure couple in her home was recognized with a 2020 Los Angeles Press Club excellence in journalism award. She's been profiled everywhere from New York Times, Washington Post, O Magazine, Prevention, to NPR. Her media appearances include Good Morning America, Real Time, CBS Early Morning, The Today Show, Oprah, and PBS Newshour. She's taught essay writing and storytelling at The School of the New York Times, Miami Dade Community College, Thurber House, George Washington U, Maine Media College, and University of Ohio, Dayton. Gurwitch thought she'd be empty nesting by now; instead, she lives in Los Angeles with her cat and child—a college graduate of the COVID class of 2020. She co-hosts the Tiny Victories podcast on the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, which Vulture called a “bright spot of light and laughter in 2020.”
Amara Hoshijo is an editor at Saga Press. Originally from Honolulu and a graduate of the University of Southern California, she left warmer climates for New York City nearly a decade ago. Prior to joining Saga Press, she was an editor at Soho Press, where she specialized in international crime fiction, debut literary fiction, and speculative fiction for more than eight years. She also managed the company’s subrights initiative and is a former Frankfurt Fellow. Amara is looking for ambitious, culturally driven projects in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Titles she acquired at Soho include Chana Porter’s The Seep, Clarissa Goenawan’s Rainbirds, Ilaria Tuti’s Flowers Over the Inferno, and Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Annie and the Wolves.
Karen Howes currently lives in Los Angeles, but is a native of New Jersey and long time resident of Atlanta, Georgia. Her plays have won festivals, grants and productions, including winning the Maxum Mazumdor New Play Prize, The New Science Driven Play Award, nominated for The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and recipient of the Women Playwright’s Initiative. She’s been a finalist/semi-finalist for Humanitas, Henley Rose and Ashland (and others).Theaters producing her work include The Academy, Alleyway, Miribou Arts, Arts Center Live, The Zephyr, The Tangent, SkyLight, GreenLight, OnionMan, Chatham, OpenEye, Boxfest Detroit and The Blank. She is also a published journalist/investigative reporter, poet, novelist, lyricist and a writing/theatre professor at the NY Film Academy and Long Beach City College. She was recently awarded a commission to write the libretto and lyrics for a musical on the women’s rights movement and has had two other musicals fully produced. In addition to her professional theatre work, Karen works on projects that focus on using theater to help at-risk communities for which she worked under a Kennedy Center Grant for the William Inge Center, and with the MET to create a play about famous artists and their works. She’s a member of the 35th Anniversary Inge PlayLab and has plays published in several Best Of Anthologies. Karen also directed youth theater and served as Artistic Director for the Young Actors Ensemble. She has a BA in Philosophy, an MFA in Writing for the Performing Arts from UC Riverside, and is a professional member of the Dramatists Guild.
Boris Kachka is the books editor of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was an editor and writer at New York magazine for two decades. He has written profiles of authors including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Harper Lee; investigated turmoil at various cultural and media institutions; expanded books coverage across the publication’s many verticals; and covered film, television, theater and book publishing. He is also the author of “Hothouse,” a cultural history of the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux; “Becoming a Veterinarian”; and “Becoming a Producer.”
Rachel Kowal is Managing Editor of Soho Press where she specializes in mysteries, literary novels, memoirs, short stories, and YA books.
Danya Kukafka is the author of the nationally bestselling novels Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow, both available now. She works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management.
Danya grew up in Colorado, and moved to New York City for school, where her love for reading and writing have taken her through nearly every facet of the publishing industry. She began as a student at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she created a major titled “The Art of the Novel.” After internships at various literary agencies, she followed that passion to Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, where she was privileged to work as an assistant editor for writers like Meg Wolitzer, Paula Hawkins, Lauren Groff, Brit Bennett, Emma Straub, Gabriel Tallent, Helen Oyeyemi, Maile Meloy, Sigrid Nunez, and many more. Danya’s debut novel, Girl in Snow, was released in 2017 by Simon & Schuster—it was a national bestseller, an IndieNext Pick, a B&N Discover pick, and received favorable reviews from The New York Times (Editor's Choice) and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Girl in Snow has been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. Her newest novel, Notes on an Execution, also an IndieNext Pick and national bestseller, was reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many more outlets. It is currently in development for television series.
Joe Loya As a boy in the early 70s, Joe dreamt of becoming a philosophy professor or a theologian. He loved ideas and words. His preacher father prepared him for academia by teaching him both Greek and Latin. In 1971, when Joe was 9 years old, Joe’s beloved mom died after a prolonged painful illness. Joe’s memoir, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, tells the story of how his home life turned brutal until he picked up a steak knife and plunged it into his father’s neck. The book details his subsequent descent into crime, culminating with a 30-bank heist spree and eventual arrest. He ended up in solitary confinement for almost 2 years, where he returned to his boyhood dream of one day becoming a writer. He discovered his voice on the page, and the trajectory of his life was permanently altered. 3 years later he reentered society, and became contributing editor for the Pacific News Service. He began writing Op-Eds for national newspapers. His first official job as a professional writer. Now committed to becoming a contributing member of society, Joe practiced meditation and used writing to encourage young people behind bars to find their emancipations. Joe has spoken to prisoners all across the country, and eventually even in prisons as far away as Norway. He joined the Board of Directors for Walden House, a reentry program. He has conducted writing workshops in reentry facilities and prisons all across California. Joe also worked hard on repairing his relationship with his father. He and his father have since visited and spoken to prisoners incarcerated for domestic battery to share their powerful story and encourage compassion and reconciliation around a painful shared past. Joe became a talking head on TV, sharing his opinions about crime, culture and religion on CNN, Nightline, CBS News/48 Hours, and Court TV. He even argued with Bill O’Reilly on his TV show, The O’Reilly Factor. Joe’s critically acclaimed memoir, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions Of A Bank Robber was published in 2004. That same year he began a correspondence with an incarcerated woman. He encouraged her to write about her life. Piper Kerman was eventually released from prison and published one of Joe’s letters in her bestselling memoir, Orange Is the New Black. In 2010, Joe published his award-winning essay Soundtracking A Bank Robbery in McSweeney’s magazine. Film director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) read the essay and contacted Joe to consult on his Baby Driver film script. Joe took the consulting gig, and in 2017 Joe also played the ironic role of a bank guard who gets shot and killed by Jamie Foxx during a harrowing heist getaway. Joe has also written for the TV shows Queen of the South and Taken. Joe spends his days preparing to launch Watcha! Media. He’s also toiling to create a coming-of-age TV show about a badass girl who navigates the treacheries of middle school with help from her ex-con father who offers insights into insecure juvenile motivations that he learned from his many years behind bars. A 16-episode podcast about Joe’s life adventure, Bank Robber Diaries, produced by Western Sound, launched in November 2019.
Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street and most recently These Women which was a The New York Times best thriller of 2020. These Women was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Edgar Award, the California Book Award, The Macavity Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. Wonder Valley won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and France’s Le Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine. Visitation Street won the Prix Page America in France. Her books have been widely translated. Her first novel, The Art of Disappearing was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times & The Los Angeles Review of Books. She teaches creative writing at the Studio 526 Skid Row.
BJ Robbins opened her Los Angeles-based agency in 1992 after a multifaceted career in book publishing in NY. She started in publicity at Simon & Schuster and was later Marketing Director and then Senior Editor at Harcourt. Her agency represents quality fiction, both literary and commercial, and general nonfiction, with a particular interest in memoir, biography, narrative history, pop culture, sports, travel/adventure, medicine and health.
Annmarie Sairrino is an experienced international producer who has specialized in adapting Japanese creative properties for global, English-language production. She has led AMMO Entertainment since establishing the company in 2020. Ms. Sairrino began her entertainment career in 2003 with Golden Globe-winning producer Sandy Climan (THE AVIATOR) and his firm Entertainment Media Ventures. In 2012, she joined All Nippon Entertainment Works (ANEW), rising to senior vice president of development and production and serving with the company for five years. During her time with ANEW, Ms. Sairrino set up a diverse slate of projects derived from Japanese properties, including the superhero action title TIGER & BUNNY (Imagine Entertainment), the action-thriller SHIELD OF STRAW (Depth of Field), the horror-thriller GHOST TRAIN (Depth of Field, with Sonic the Hedgehog franchise screenwriters Josh Miller and Patrick Casey), the action-horror SOUL REVIVER (Bedford Falls), the dramatic horror BIRTHRIGHT (Depth of Field), the action-sci-fi GAIKING (Valhalla Entertainment), and the survival horror 6000 (Phoenix Pictures). In 2017, Ms. Sairrino left ANEW and established Akatsuki Entertainment USA, a film division of leading Japanese mobile game developer Akatsuki. While leading the company, she developed a large slate of projects and produced the feature films ROOM 203 and ROOT LETTER. Today, under the auspices of her AMMO Entertainment banner, Ms. Sairrino manages the properties and slate of projects initiated by Akatsuki Entertainment USA, and is additionally developing further adapted and original properties from across the globe.
Rider Strong is an actor, writer, director, screenwriter, and playwright. After being cast as Gavroche in the San Francisco production of Les Miserables at the age of 10, Rider began an acting career that spanned a variety of genres and formats. He became best known in his teens for his role of Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World, which ran for seven seasons on ABC. After the show wrapped, Rider pursued his education, graduating magna cum laude from Columbia University and receiving his M.F.A. in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. Meanwhile, he starred in Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. He’s been covered in blood for a slew of horror and thriller films since. Back on stage, he was Benjamin Braddock in both the First US National Tour and Australian productions of The Graduate. Moving behind the camera with his brother, Rider wrote and directed short films that have played over 60 festivals worldwide and won both audience and juried awards. He returned to his roots, this time as a director, for three seasons of the Emmy-nominated Girl Meets World. In addition to his screenwriting, Rider’s writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Bullet Magazine, Shondaland, and more. His play Never Ever Land premiered at Theatre Unleashed in Los Angeles in 2019 and his video for Typhoon’s “We’re In It” premiered in 2021. He’s currently at work on several film projects.
Vanessa Angelica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
Kim Young is the author of Tigers (PANK Books, 2020) and Night Radio, winner of the 2011 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (The University of Utah Press) and finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Divided Highway (Dancing Girl Press, 2008). She is the founding editor of Chaparral, an online journal featuring poetry from Southern California, and her poems and essays have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, TriQuarterly, POOL and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.