Each residency, we're joined by two dozen guest faculty members -- consisting of visiting writers and industry professionals -- to teach and advise our students, along with our award-winning core faculty. If you're applying and interested in visiting during our upcoming term -- June 2-11th -- please contact us at palmdesertmfa@ucr.edu.  

Here's our amazing slate of guests & core faculty members this spring:   

Larry Biederman was introduced to Los Angeles with his acclaimed productions of Eric Overmyer’s Dark Rapture starring Nick Offerman at the Evidence Room, and the World Premiere of Crumble by Sheila Callaghan (“Shameless”) at LATC.  Both enjoyed extended runs and wide critical praise, including Critics Choice from the L.A. Times. In addition to these successful writers of theatre and television, Biederman’s biggest collaborator from the television world has been Winnie Holzman (Wicked, "My So-Called Life"), serving as the on-set coach for her series “Huge” (ABC Family). He also directed Holzman and husband, actor Paul Dooley, on two successful productions of their play Assisted Living, premiering at the Odyssey Theatre in L.A., and then moving east to a run at the George Street Playhouse. Most recently he staged a festival presentation of Stupid Kid by Sharr White (“The Affair”) starring Laurie Metcalf and Tom Irwin and another Sheila Callaghan L.A. premiere of We Are Not These Hands at Rogue Machine Theatre. He has directed two premieres of Mickey Birnbaum’s plays.  The first, the L.A. premiere of Big Death and Little Death, included a live death metal band at the Road Theatre.  The second, a world premiere of Backyard at the Echo Theatre Company, earned Ovation awards for Best Actor and Best Fight Choreography, as well as five Stage Raw Award nominations including Best Direction. Biederman was involved with both plays since directing their first workshop presentations at ASK Theater Projects and the William Inge Theatre Festival, respectively. Other premiere productions include Keith Josef Adkin’s Farewell Miss Cotton at the Black Dahlia, David Rock’s Grand Delusion at the Lost Studio and Matthew Benjamin and Logan Brown’s Wirehead for the Echo Theatre Company, earning seven LA Weekly Award nominations including Best Direction of a Comedy. Biederman also enjoys the classics, including direction of Moliere’s The Learned Ladies at Theatre of NOTE, Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden at Antaeus, which earned three more LA Weekly award nominations including Best Revival. In 2009, Biederman took his innovative staging of Schnitzler’s La Ronde to the New York International Fringe Festival where, in addition to critical acclaim, both actors received Best Actor awards for the festival. Biederman spent seven seasons with San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, directing and serving in many senior capacities on the A.C.T. artistic staff, and as Associate Director of their M.F.A. program. Bay Area productions include Peter Barnes’ Red Noses, also a Critic’s Choice and named one of the year's 10 best productions, as well as the acclaimed West Coast premiere of Constance Congdon’s No Mercy which he later remounted for the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles. Between productions, he enjoys the countless collaborations, workshops and readings with L.A.’s great playwrights. His staging of Bryan Davidson’s Death’s Messengers at the MET Theatre earned them two LA Weekly Theater Award nominations for writing and direction.  They later collaborated on an adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper which was presented at the Theatre @ Boston Court. Biederman teaches directing and acting, both privately and for many reputable training programs throughout the country from the Williamstown Theatre Festival to the Old Globe and locally at Cal State Fullerton where he served three years as their Head of Directing.  He has had the privilege of directing great actors during their training years, including Omid Abtahi, Elizabeth Banks, Jim Parsons, and Anika Noni Rose.  Currently, he is a Professor of Directing at Cal State Northridge.

 

Cecil Castellucci is the award winning and New York Times Bestselling author of books and graphic novels for young adults including Shade, The Changing Girl, Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, Soupy Leaves Home, The Year of the Beasts, Tin Star, Female Furies and Odd Duck. In 2015 they co-authored Star Wars Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure. She has also written Batgirl for DC Comics. Their newest graphic novel is Shifting Earth out on Dark Horse Comics. Her short stories and short comics have been published in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and many other anthologies. In a former life, she was known as Cecil Seaskull in the ‘90s indie band Nerdy Girl. She has written three opera librettos Les Aventures de Madame Merveille (World Premiere in 2010) Hockey Noir: The Opera (World Premiere 2018) and Metternich! The Language of Flowers (World Premiere 2021). They are the former Children’s Correspondence Coordinator for The Rumpus, a two-time MacDowell Fellow, and the founding YA Editor at the LA Review of Books. Their pandemic projects have been rewatching every Disney film in order and researching a British World War I soldier. They live in Los Angeles and spend time in Montreal.

 

Anna Dorn has published three books: Vagablonde, Bad Lawyer, and Exalted. Exalted was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Anna is also an associate editor at Hobart Pulp. Her next book Perfume & Pain is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor and contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Book Review, The Alpinist, Catapult, and other national publications. She is Faculty Lecturer of the Year for 2022 at Chaffey College, where she founded the award-winning literary journal and creative collective, The Chaffey Review, advises Student Media, and teaches poetry and critical thinking in the California Institutes for Men and Women in Chino. She has been recognized as a Longreads Top 5 for her article on the relationship between environmentalism and hope in The Alpinist, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and profiled on the second season of Sincerely X, a TED production for stories too risky, painful, or controversial to be shared on the stage. Her popular Modern Love column in The New York Times inspired a book contract. Michelle was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to identify flora and fauna, navigate by the stars, forage for edible plants, and care for the earth. As an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher, she has been teaching students and training teachers in southern California studios since 2008, as well as teaching yoga to employees at local businesses and leading Yoga on Tap at Claremont Craft Ales. Michelle’s first book, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, a memoir forthcoming with Algonquin Press, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness. 

Rae Dubow created Talking Out Loud, a communications company specifically to provide public speaking training in the professional and academic spheres. She has extensive performance training and worked as an actor for many years. This is the basis of her practice, which uses dramatic techniques to help clients relax and speak publicly as their most authentic selves. Public speaking is an enormous challenge for most people, outranking the fear of death. Having experienced her own performance anxieties, she discovered ways to work with these issues and keep them at bay. In addition to Talking Out Loud, Rae has taught at the University of Southern California, Antioch University Los Angeles, UC Riverside, and Woodbury University. Her private clients include actor/activist Edward Asner, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Kahn-Cullors, Los Angeles architect Barbara Bestor, and actress Genevieve Angleson. Her corporate and nonprofit clients include The Southern California News Group (SCNG), Dress for Success, and MOSTe, which offers similar training to high school girls from disadvantaged backgrounds who are working towards college admission.

Charli Engelhorn is a staff writer on The Cleaning Lady on FOX and former associate producer on Crank Yankers. A graduate of the Low Residency MFA at UCR, Charli previously was an award-winning journalist and is a Warner Brothers Television Workshop alumni.

 

Janet Fitch is an American author  and teacher of fiction writing. She is the author of the #1 national bestseller White Oleander, a novel translated into 24 languages, an Oprah Book Club book and the basis of a feature film, Paint It Black, also widely translated and made into a 2017 film, and her epic novels of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral. Additionally, she has written a young adult novel, Kicks, short stories, essays, articles, and reviews, contributed to anthologies and regularly teaches at the Community of Writers Summer Workshops, and in their online program. She taught creative writing for 14 years in the USC Master of Professional Writing program, as well as VCFA’s Writing and Publishing program, A Room of Her Own (AROHO), the UCLA Writer’s Program, and Pomona College. She lectures frequently on fiction writing. Fitch was a 2009 Likhachev Cultural Fellow to St. Petersburg, Russia, a Helen R. Whiteley Fellow, a Research Fellow at the Huntington Library and a Moseley Fellow at Pomona College. Fitch graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1978 with a BA in History. She lives in Los Angeles and travels whenever she gets the chance.

Ashley Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020). She’s the recipient of a 2021 Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center as well as fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Her work can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Mag has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University.

Zach Gonzalez-Landis grew up in a one-stoplight town in Michigan until his parents' remarriage spurred a cross-country move to Arizona. He pursued comedy in college and Chicago, where he performed improv, sketch comedy, theater, and once did stand-up as a zombie. Zach holds an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, participated in the NHMC Television Writers Program, and is a Sundance Episodic Lab fellow. As a writers' assistant, he co-wrote the Part Three finale of Mr. Iglesias (Netflix) and worked on The Big Leap (Fox). He's served as an advisor for Sundance Collab and most recently was staffed on the multi-cam comedy Basic Witches (Disney Channel).

Lynn Grant Beck was recently hired to write 2 episodes for season 2 of Cypher on Roku. Her play, All American, which was developed at UCR, was nominated for Best Drama and won the Hollywood Producers Encore Award at the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival. An original pilot, The House that Jackie Built, and an adapted pilot, French Vanilla & Felonies, are currently out to market. She’s also written an action/disaster feature, BlackOut, as well as two animated family features, Sandra Claus and The TreasureD Cat. She was hired to write a TV pilot, Hashers, by Google VP, Jim Kolotouros. Her TV movie thriller, My Mom is a Bank Robber, aired on Lifetime in 2016 and her TV movie rom-com, 12 Gifts of Christmas, aired on the Hallmark Channel in 2015. Her other MOW scripts include Spring Break Nightmare, Quiet Night, Trapped, and Cult of Lies.  Her indie thriller, Dead Wrong, won an award in the WIF/MORE Screenplay contest and was optioned by the director, John Rhode. Her half hour pilot, Life in 2D, won a fellowship at the Writers Boot Camp, and she was hired to co-write a sci-fi web series, The Annex, by director Hank Isaac. She was also hired to write the feature comedy, Hollywood Hit, for Miracle Mile Ent. Her other feature scripts include two comedies, James Borkowsky 000 and Trophy Husband, two romantic comedies, The Death of Art and Trouble, and a sci-fi adventure story, Jonny Was. She’s also written a sci-fi pilot, Fuzion, and a half hour tween pilot, Twindroids. In 2019 she co-produced an award-winning short horror film, House of Redemption. She currently teaches screenwriting at Script University, and has taught at Pepperdine University, Spalding University, the University of Auckland, and SMC. She received her MFA in Screenwriting with a minor in Playwriting at UCR in 2021. She has significant industry experience as VP of Production at Kopelson Entertainment, as well as a CE at Interscope Communications. During her tenure at Interscope she traveled to Australia where she was an assistant producer on Pitch Black with Vin Diesel. Originally from NJ, Lynn founded the independent theater company, The Chelsea Players, in NY where she wrote and produced numerous successful Off-off Broadway plays. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Russian Studies, she worked as an assistant director for the Nikitsky Vorot Theater and traveled with the theater around the former Soviet Union on the heels of its collapse. She wrote about that experience in a memoir titled Adventure in the Soviet Union. She’s also written numerous manuscripts for children’s books.

Don Handfield was the co-creator and Executive Producer of History Channel's drama series Knightfall and producer of critically-acclaimed films The Founder starring Michael Keaton, and Kill The Messenger starring two-time Academy-Award nominated actor Jeremy Renner. Handfield is currently writing an original scripted comedy series for Paramount + and adapting the graphic novel UNIKORN for Stampede Ventures with Debbie Berman (editor of Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Homecoming) attached to direct. Handfield is a partner and board member of top-indie comic label Scout Comics and his original comic series The Rift was optioned by Steven Spielberg and produced as the season finale for the Apple + reboot of Amazing Stories.  Handfield is a fellow of the WGA Showrunner Training Program, the Film Independent's Director's Lab and was named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine.

Matt Horwitz got his start at Sleeping Giant Entertainment before joining Echo Lake in 2013 focusing on writers and directors in all aspects of TV and film. His clients have worked on such hit shows as AMERICAN DAD, CALL YOUR MOTHER, TACOMA FD, MAGNUM PI, THE YOUNG ROCK, ARROW, THE FLASH, STRANGER THINGS, and THE CONNERS just to name a few. He has set up client projects at just about every network or streamer that you can think of, (and several that you probably didn’t even know existed). Originally from the Washington DC area, he attended Indiana University and has had a passion for TV and Film since a young age when he discovered that people actually made the things he was watching every day, and that passion has helped him guide and build the careers of creative people from the lowest levels all the way to the top!.

Amara Hoshijo is a senior editor at Saga Press. Originally from Honolulu and a graduate of the University of Southern California, she left warmer climates for New York City a decade ago. Prior to joining Saga, 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.

Dara Hyde  is Senior Agent at the Hill Nadell Literary Agency and represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including literary and genre fiction, graphic novels, narrative non-fiction, memoir, young adult, and children’s literature. Her clients have been winners or finalists for the Women’s Prize, NAACP Image Award, Carnegie Medal, Eisner Award, Anthony Award, YALSA Award, Harvey Award, International Latino Book Award, and the Reading the West Award, among others. "I’m drawn to stories that examine social issues in unique ways, and voices that have been historically under-represented in publishing; stories that explore the bonds and complexities of both blood and chosen families; stories with crossover appeal, whether that’s YA/adult or blending genres in surprising ways. I relish being hooked by a high concept and a clever premise, but that creative vision needs strong character development and an attention to every word. I find imperfect characters more interesting than those that start off with all the answers, and I want to walk away from every book having learned something new. Before joining Hill Nadell, I spent over a decade as an editor and rights and permissions manager at independent publisher Grove Atlantic in New York. I enjoy every aspect of the publishing process and helping my clients from idea to finished book and beyond is always a thrill. When I’m not reading I’m probably watching a movie, hopefully on TCM or Criterion."

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.”

Jud Laghi runs the eponymous Jud Laghi Agency, a full-service literary agency that represents fiction and non-fiction at every stage of the publishing process. Jud’s hands-on style includes significant editorial guidance on proposals and manuscripts for the strongest possible publisher submission, and an exploration of all potential opportunities for boosting the marketing and publicity of his clients’ books once they have been published, as well as licensing foreign and translation, audio, serial, film, television, and other digital and online rights. His clients include Jaime Lowe, Peter Zeihan, Dakin Campbell, Davy Rothbart, Brian Raftery, Tim Layden, Jason Turbow, Farah Pandith, Sally Hogshead, Justin and Sydnee McElroy, Portlandia star and Sleater-Kinney guitarist and vocalist Carrie Brownstein, all-time Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, and rock legends Gene Simmons and Kenny Loggins. Jud has represented, developed and launched a broad spectrum of trendsetting and bestselling books throughout his career, by authors of narrative nonfiction, journalism, cultural criticism, memoir, popular culture, prescriptive nonfiction and business, as well as select fiction, middle grade and YA. Before forming JLA, Jud worked as a literary agent at LJK Literary Management and at ICM, where he began his agenting career. He is a graduate of Trinity College with a B.A. in English and creative writing.

Stefanie Leder is an upper-level TV dramedy writer with an unusual path. She has been dirt poor, wildly rich, and somewhere in between. She has been a socialist at UC Berkeley, a union organizer in Seattle, a community organizer in San Francisco, a radical in Central America, an ESL teacher, an almost FBI agent, and is now a TV and film writer. She’s lived in Central America, London, and Hawaii. She speaks English and Spanish. Her credits include writing and producing on Men At Work, Melissa & Joey, Faking It, and Boo, Bitch. She’s developed for the CW, Netflix, and Disney. Most recently she showran a pilot and mini-room for Disney. She is currently in development with Disney on another pilot (paused due to strike.)

Dinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, among them Murphy Brown’s Secretary number three, Eileen/Abraham on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a nun with a gun on Sons of Anarchy, ER’s no-nonsense Nurse Shirley, Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude (in Hamlet), and also his Lady Macbeth (of course). She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently serves as a member of the core faculty in nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of two memoirs, The Object Parade and Bigger than Life (excerpted for the “Lives” column in The New York Times Magazine), Dinah served as a long-time nonfiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Echo Park.

Katherine MacDonald is currently a Producer at Netflix and previously served as the Senior Vice President of Paramount Animation at Paramount Pictures, the Director of International Research & Client Services at Nielsen Corporation, Director and Head of Research at MGM, as well as previous executive experience at Lionsgate and New Line Cinema.  She is also the co-author of The Marketing Edge for Filmmakers: Developing a Marketing Mindset from Concept to Release: Developing a Marketing Mindset from Concept to Release. She holds an MFA from the Low Residency MFA at UC Riverside. 

Jennifer Maisel The daughter of an adhesives manufacturer and a teacher, Jennifer Maisel grew up in a picture perfect Long Island suburb where she once found a dead man in her driveway – which may account for one reviewer’s assessment of her writing as a “sort of David Lynch on estrogen”. Her THE LAST SEDER, starring Gaby Hoffmann, premiered off-Broadway with Rosalind Productions after productions around the country, including D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.  Her THERE OR HERE premiered with Hypothetical Theatre in New York and at the Park Theatre in London with Special Relationship Productions.  @thespeedofJake, a Kilroy nominee in 2014 and a Kilroy Honorable Mention in 2015, premiered with Playwrights’ Arena in Los Angeles in 2015, was named a PEN West Literary Award finalist, and was subsequently produced at MadLabs in Ohio.  Her OUT OF ORBIT, workshopped at the Sundance, Berkshire Playwrights Lab, Cal Rep and the Gulf Shore New Play Festival, and recipient of Alfred P Sloan commission for plays about science and technology and The Stanley Award for Drama, made the 2016 Kilroy List. It was then awarded the Woodward Newman award for drama and premiered at Williamston Theatre and Bloomington Playwrights Project in 2018. Backstage included Jennifer amongst their “favorite female playwrights” and The Dramatist Magazine named her one of their “Ones to Watch. She was recently listed by Theatre Nerds as one of 30 Female Playwrights You Should Know. Jennifer’s EIGHT NIGHTS was workshopped with the Berkshire Playwrights Lab, Antaeus, Moving Arts Bay Street Theatre and Playmakers was  part of the 2018 Gulfshore New Play Festival.  EIGHT NIGHTS will premiere with Antaeus Theatre in 2019.  The play is also part of a national fundraiser for HIAS called 8 Nights of EIGHT NIGHTS. Jennifer was one of five playwrights who were part of the prestigious Humanitas PlayLA group, developing her newest play, BETTER, which culminated in a festival reading in September 2018 in collaboration with the Road Theatre in Los Angeles. Jennifer’s other plays have been developed and produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Magic Theatre, The Organic Theatre,  Rattlestick Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre (New York and Los Angeles), South Coast Repertory,  Playwrights’ Arena, The Bat at the Flea, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey,  The LARK, The Hypothetical, Epic Theatre Ensemble,  Theatre J,  Rorschach Theatre,  The Victory Theatre, Circle X Theatre,  Theatre of NOTE and Teatro da Juventude (Brazil) among others.  She has developed plays at the Playwrights Center’s PlayLabs in Minneapolis, ASK Theatre Project’s Spring Writer’s retreat, NYU’s FirstLook@NewPlays in New York, University of the Arts New Play Festival, Moving Arts MADLabs, Cypress College’s New Play Festival (five times) in California, the Berkshire Playwrights Lab,  PlayPenn in Philadelphia and the 2010 Sundance Theatre Lab @Mass MOCA (OUT OF ORBIT). Jennifer was the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Award and their Charlotte Woolard Award for Promising New Voice in American Theatre, as well their Roger Stevens Award for Playwrights of Extraordinary Promise.  She won South Coast Repertory’s California Playwrights Competition and was a finalist for the PEN West Literary Award (twice),  the Sundance Theatre Lab,  the O’Neill Theatre Conference (twice), the STAGES International Playwriting Competition,  the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, Abingdon Theatre’s Christopher Brian Wolk Award (twice), the Ojai Playwrights Festival and the Heideman Award (three times).   Backstage included Jennifer amongst their “favorite female playwrights” and The Dramatist Magazine named her one of their “Ones to Watch. She is one of seven playwrights commissioned by Playwrights’ Arena and Center Theatre Group for the collaborative THE HOTEL PLAY, premiered in 2017. Jennifer has been a guest lecturer and speaker at Fordham University, University of the Arts, Cal State Long Beach, the UCLA Extension Writers Program, AFI, the David Hwang Playwriting Institute, Cornell University, Footlights in Washington DC and Claremont College. She has taught playwriting at USC,  and currently teaches television and screenwriting for the Stephens College Low Residency Master of Fine Arts program. In the world of film and television, her screenplay, Lost Boy, was filmed starring Virginia Madsen. She wrote The Assault  and The March Sisters for Mar Vista Entertainment and Double Wedding for Jaffe Braunstein and adapted two Jane Green novels for Lifetime’s Book-to-Screen series that aired in 2019. She has written movies for NBC, ABC, MTV and Lifetime, was a staff writer on the television series, RELATED, wrote a pilot for ABC Family and developed an animated feature for Disney.  She co-created the critically acclaimed web series Faux Baby with Laura Brennan and Rachel Leventhal.  The screenplay adaptation of her play THE LAST SEDER won Showtime’s Tony Cox Screenwriting Award, meriting her a month’s stay in a haunted farmhouse at the Nantucket Screenwriter’s Colony.  She has developed original pilots with Bunim-Murray, Ineffable, Stun Media and MomentumTV. A graduate of Cornell University, Jennifer received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the WGA, the Playwrights Union, Playwrights Ink and The Dog Ear Playwrights Collective.  She is represented by Heroes and Villains and the Susan Schulman Literary Agency. More can be found at jennifermaisel.com.

Kathryn E. McGee's horror stories have appeared in Ladies of the Fright, Kelp Journal, Scoundrel Time, Gamut Magazine, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Chromophobia anthology. Her story, “Mondays Are for Meat,” was recently optioned for film. “The Creek Keepers’ Lodge” (Horror Library Vol. 6) was listed as an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10. She regularly publishes articles about horror books and film on The Lineup. Additionally, she co-authored a book of stories about downtown Los Angeles, DTLA37: Downtown Los Angeles in Thirty-seven Stories (Enville Publishing). She has an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert. Kathryn is represented by Dara Hyde at Hill Nadell Literary Agency. For more information, visit www.kathrynemcgee.com

Patrick Newman is a literary manager at Mosaic Media Group.

Dr. Sunita Puri is the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center & Chan School of Medicine, where she is also an associate professor of clinical medicine. A graduate of Yale University, she completed medical school and residency training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco followed by fellowship training in palliative medicine at Stanford. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. She is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her writing and book have been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, JAMA, the Atlantic, NPR, India Today, the Asian Age, the Oncology Times, and, forthcoming, the New Yorker. In 2019, the Guardian made a mini-documentary of her work in palliative medicine which has been viewed nearly 3 million times. She has been interviewed on the PBS Cristian Amanpour show, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, ZDogg MD’s show, and numerous podcasts.  In 2018, she was awarded the Etz Chaim Tree of Life Award from the USC School of Medicine, awarded annually to a member of the faculty who, in the eyes of the campus community, models and provides humanistic and compassionate care. She has taught medical memoir and literary nonfiction to medical students and residents, and has delivered talks about palliative medicine, the centrality of narrative and storytelling in medicine, and physician well-being in forums around the world.

Jim Ruland the author of the LA Times bestseller Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, the award-winning novel Forest of Fortune and the short story collection Big Lonesome. He is the  co-author of Do What You Want with Bad Religion, My Damage with Keith Morris, founding member of Black Flag, Circle Jerks and OFF!, and Giving the Finger with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch. Jim writes about punk and pop culture for Razorcake — America’s only non-profit independent music zine. He also writes book reviews and author profiles for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Jim’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Believer, Electric Literature, Esquire, Granta, and Oxford American, and has received awards from Reader’s Digest and the National Endowment for the Arts. Jim is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and has worked for advertising agencies, entertainment enterprises, and the gaming industry.

Nathania Searles Oh Originally from the Cayman Islands, Nathania Oh is an entertainment industry veteran with more than 20 years of production experience that started with hosting a music video show (remember those?). After earning her B.A. in Telecommunications from Pepperdine University, she went on to earn her animation stripes working on the groundbreaking series “The Ren & Stimpy Show” and has worked with such media giants as Sony Pictures Entertainment, HBO and Cartoon Network. She first discovered her enthusiasm for mentoring as an entertainment and marketing executive where she was proficient in leading large, interdisciplinary work teams. Through strategic communication she found ways to lead her team and colleagues in ways to blend well-reasoned instincts and theory with best practices to execute unparalleled brand extension and storytelling. Eager to share this real-world industry experience with collegiate students, she completed her MFA in nonfiction and screenwriting with University of California, Riverside where she worked on The Coachella Review, the low residency program’s literary journal. Prior to joining Dodge College, she was a visiting professor at The Oregon Extension where she led and taught the Creative Writing component to university students recruited nationwide for a semester spent in the mountains of Southern Oregon rooted in Environmental Studies and Sustainability. Through instruction she inspires students on ways to harness their passion and authenticity while making their mark on the world. She believes and teaches that humor coupled with candor are the key to a great narrative. Recently published in Coast Magazine of The Orange County Register, The Coachella Review, the Redlands Review, Anastamos and The Kelp Journal, she lives, writes and teaches in Orange County, CA. In between teaching, working on her first full-length memoir and volunteering with the Newport/Mesa ProLiteracy program, she explores the world through food and travel with her husband and young daughter by her side.

Dan Smetanka is the Senior Vice President and Editorial Director of the Catapult Book Group, which includes Counterpoint Press, for which he is Editor-in-Chief, Catapult, and Soft Skull. Books he's acquired recently include winners and finalists for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Hammett Prize, The Edgar Award, NAACP Image Award, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Story Prize, plus countless New York Times Best Books of the Year, LA Times Best Books of the Year, USA Today Best Books of the Year, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist STARRED titles, national and international bestsellers, and so much more...all while currently corralling a motley crew of authors including Natashia Deon, Gina Frangello, Maggie Downs, Elizabeth Crane, Dana Johnson, Joan Silber, Ben Ehrenreich, Karen Bender, Elizabeth Rosner, Jaret Yates Sexton, Nawaaz Ahmed, Maria Hummel, Joe Meno, Jaime Harrison, Tod Goldberg, and many more.

Olivia Taylor Smith  joined Simon & Schuster in 2022 as Senior Editor. Prior to joining S&S, Olivia was the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Unnamed Press in Los Angeles for over eight years where she published over 88 books. Her focus has always been on championing dynamic and voice-driven storytelling from the US and around the world, particularly by debut authors, and including books like A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novel Award), Homesick by Jennifer Croft (winner of the Saroyan International Prize), and Like a Bird by Fariha Roisin (one of NPR and Vogue’s Best Books of 2020). Titles Olivia has acquired and are forthcoming at S&S include Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell, The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas, Misrecognition by Madison Newbound, A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E. Grant, The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza, and Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright.

Aja Vasquez is a Southern California native. She received an MFA in creative writing from UCR’s Palm Desert Center along with an MA English and EdD in Educational Leadership. Her writing is focused on memoir and suburban horror stories. She has been teaching college writing for a few decades, specializing in curriculum development for writing programs. She is currently a business writing lecturer at CSU Fullerton and a doctoral writing coach. In her personal time, she enjoys watching horror movies, visiting local paranormal hotspots, and trying to grow plants on her balcony. She lives in the Inland Empire with, perhaps, an innumerable yet not hoarder-status number of pets and children, as well as multiple year-round Christmas trees and Halloween decorations.

Rax Will is an alum of the UC Riverside MFA in Fiction and is a James Beard-nominated journalist. Their writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Eater, New York Times, and more. 

 

MFA Faculty

 

Mickey Birnbaum’s play Big Death & Little Death inaugurated Woolly Mammoth’s new Washington D.C. theatre in 2005. It has been produced subsequently at Perishable Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island; Crowded Fire in San Francisco; the Road Theatre in Los Angeles; and the Catastrophic Theater in Houston. The play was nominated for a 2006 Helen Hayes/Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play, and was a 2006 PEN USA Literary Awards Finalist. His play Bleed Rail premiered at the Theatre@Boston Court in Los Angeles in 2007, and won a 2008 Garland Award for Playwriting. Mickey spent two months living in playwright William Inge’s boyhood home in Independence, Kansas as the recipient of a 2006 Inge Fellowship. He has written numerous children’s plays for L.A.’s celebrated non-profit organization, Virginia Avenue Project. He is a founding member of Dog Ear, a Los Angeles collective of nationally-renowned playwrights (visit www.dogear.org), as well as The Playwrights’ Union, and was a member of the 2008-2009 Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop. Over a thirty year career, Mickey has written screenplays for Universal, Paramount, Columbia/Sony, Interscope, Warner Brothers, and Leonardo di Caprio’s Appian Way Productions. He collaborated with director Steven Shainberg (Secretary, Fur) on the screenplay for The Big Shoe and recently adapted the John Irving novel The Fourth Hand in collaboration with Shainberg. He wrote The Tie that Binds (1995), starring Keith Carradine and Darryl Hannah, for Interscope/Hollywood Pictures. Mickey received his MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of Riverside, Palm Desert in 2013. He teaches screenwriting at Santa Monica College as well. Mickey plays bass accordion for the Accordionaires, an accordion orchestra. Hs most recent play, Backyard, was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for Drama.

Yennie Cheung is the Executive Editor of the Coachella Review and co-author of DTLA/37: Downtown Los Angeles in Thirty-seven Stories. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside-Palm Desert, and her writing has been published in such places as The Los Angeles Times, Writers Resist, Angels Flight • Literary West, The Rattling Wall, and The Best Small Fictions. 

Elizabeth Crane is the author of four collections of short stories, When the Messenger is Hot, All this Heavenly Glory, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, and Turf, and the novels The History of Great Things and We Only Know So Much.  Her work has been translated into several languages and has been featured in numerous publications including Other Voices, Ecotone, Guernica, Catapult, Electric Literature, Coachella Review, Mississippi Review, Florida Review, Bat City Review, Hobart, Rookie, Fairy Tale Review, The Huffington Post, Eating Well, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Reader and The Believer, and anthologies including Altared, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Best Underground Fiction, Who Can Save Us Now?, Brute Neighbors and Dzanc’s Best of the Web.  Her stories have been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts.  She is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award, and her work has been adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater company.  A feature film adaptation of her debut novel, We Only Know So Much, won Best Feature at the Big Apple Film Festival in 2018.  Her debut memoir, This Story Will Change (Counterpoint), was released in 2022 and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico to parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in suburban Los Angeles. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. His first novel, Still Water Saints, was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The book was released simultaneously in Spanish, under the title Los santos de Agua Mansa, California, translated by Lilliana Valenzuela. His second novel, The Five Acts of Diego León, was also published by Random House in March 2013. Alex’s fiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, The Southern California Review, Flaunt, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His essays have been published at Salon.com, in the New York Times Magazine, in The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and as part of the historic Chicano Chapbook Series. He has also reviewed books for the LA Times, the American Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR. His awards include a 2009 Margaret Bridgeman Fellowship in Fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2014 Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The Five Acts of Diego León, and a 2019 Fellowship from MacDowell and inclusion in Best American Mystery & Suspense. His newest book is Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, which was published by The Unnamed Press in December, 2019. An active participant in Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Workshop and the Community of Writers, Alex is also deeply involved with the Puente Project, a program designed to help first-generation community college students make a successful transition to a university. Alex is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. His next book, Sons of El Rey, will be released next year.

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the New York Times bestselling author the novel Hausfrau, which was translated into 26 languages, and several prize-winning collections of poetry, including Heaven (winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason prize), Necropolis, Harlot, and most recently, Would-Land. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals including Poetry, The Christian Century, Image,  and The Rumpus, and has been included in textbooks and anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems and two editions of the annual Best American Poetry anthology. A two-time NEA fellow, Jill lives and writes in Austin, Tx. 

Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Low Desert (named Southwest Book of the Year), Gangsterland (a finalist for the Hammett Prize), Gangster Nation, The House of Secrets(which he co-authored with Brad Meltzer), Living Dead Girl (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and the popular Burn Notice series, three times a finalist for the Scribe Award. His books have been published in a dozen languages and around the world and were twice named a finalist for the VN international Thriller of the Year Award. His short fiction has been collected in three volumes — Simplify, which won the Other Voices Book Prize and was a finalist for the SCBA Award, Other Resort Cities, and his latest book, The Low Desert: Gangster Stories — and has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Mystery & Suspense. His nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Alta, among countless others, and has earned five Nevada Press Association Awards for excellence and was selected for Best American Essays. For his body of work, Tod was honored with the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. In addition to his work on the page, Tod is also the cohost of the podcast Literary Disco, along with Julia Pistell & Rider Strong, which was named a top podcast by the Washington Post. Tod Goldberg holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College and is a Professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside where he founded and directs the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. His next book, Gangsters Don’t Die, will be out this fall. 

Joshua Malkin has written feature projects for Sony, Fox, Universal Pictures among more than a dozen other companies. He also wrote and produced three documentaries: two about the art of puppetry, and the other about underground comics. In 2008 he wrote Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever for Lionsgate. Joshua co-authored top-selling fantasy comic book series The Source (Scout Comics, Publisher – top title, 2018) and the upcoming YA graphic novel, Unikorn. The book and screenplay for Unikorn have been acquired by Armory Films and is slated to be the directorial debut of Marvel editor Debbie Berman (Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Spiderman Homecoming.) Joshua is a professor of screenwriting at the University of California Riverside, an occasional story architect for the video game industry, and the proud – if bewildered - father of twins.

Agam Patel is the Associate Director of both the MFA program and of the UCR Palm Desert campus and is the President of the UCR Staff Assembly. He is also on the board of directors of Lotus Outreach International, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the education, health and safety of vulnerable women and children in the developing world. He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from Alliant International University and lives in Rancho Mirage, CA with his wife and two children. 

Ivy Pochoda holds a BA in Classics and Literature, with a focus on Dramatic Literature, from Harvard, where she graduated cum laude, and an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels These Women, Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and The Art of Disappearing, and has won or been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (twice!), the California Book Award, the International Thriller Award, the Strand Critics Award, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award, the Macavity Award, and others too numerous to list. Ivy is also the author of the YA/fantasy series created by the late Kobe Bryant,  Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof, an immediate New York Times bestseller, and Epoca: The River of Sand, and is an in-demand ghost writer as well. Her nonfiction and criticism appears regularly in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Wall Street Journal, among others. Her next novel, Sing Her Down, will be released this summer.

William Rabkin creator and writer of HBOAsia’s science fiction series Dream Raider, has written and/or produced hundreds of hours of dramatic television. He served as show runner on the long-running Dick Van Dyke mystery series “Diagnosis Murder” and on the action-adventure spectacle “Martial Law” and is currently creating series in Asia and Europe. He has also written a dozen network TV pilots. His work has twice been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Television Episode from the Mystery Writers of America. He has written four books on writing for television, “Writing the Pilot” (2011), “Writing the Pilot: Creating the Series” (2017), Writing the Pilot: Streaming and, with Lee Goldberg, “Successful Television Writing” (2003) and seven novels. He is the co-creator and co-editor of “The Dead Man,” a 28-book series of supernatural action thrillers published by Amazon’s 47 North imprint. Rabkin is part of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts. He is currently co-writing the miniseries Estonia: The Last Wave for the Nordic Entertainment Group and ITV.  

Emily Rapp Black  is the New York Times bestselling author of Poster Child: A Memoir (BloomsburyUSA) and The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), a New York Times bestseller and an Editor’s Pick, Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor's Pick, and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center, Fundacion Valparaiso, and Bucknell University. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, Die Zeit, The Times-London, Lenny Letter, The Sun, TIME, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, O the Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and other publications and anthologies. She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the School of Medicine. She is a member of the Inequities in Health Care Working Group and an architect of the Medical Narratives minor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the mother of two children: Ronan (2010-2013), and Charlotte.

Rob Roberge is the acclaimed author of several books, including the memoir Liar, named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and best of the year selection by Powell’s and Entropy, the novels The Cost of Living, More Than They Could Chew, and Drive, and the short story collection Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life. His short fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Palm Springs Noir and Silver Waves of Summer, and acclaimed by media outlets such as the New York Times Book Review, NPR, and the LA Times. In addition to writing and teaching, he is a guitarist and singer/songwriter in The Hitchcock Brunettes and the seminal LA art punk band, The Urinals, who’ve shared bills with Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, The Dream Syndicate, and the Go-Go’s, and whose songs have been covered by Yo La Tengo, The Minutemen, The Gun Club, No Age, and many others. He also wrote and directed the short film This Regrettable Event. He holds an MFA from Vermont College is an assistant professor and core faculty member of the Low Residency MFA at UC Riverside. He is at work on a new novel and several music projects and lives in Chicago with his wife and fellow Hitchcock Brunette, the writer Gina Frangello, along with their daughter and two astonishingly overweight cats.

John Schimmel is in the middle of an extraordinarily diverse career as a writer/producer. He’s been the President of Michael Douglas’ Furthur Films and President of Production at Ascendant Pictures, an executive at Douglas-Reuther Productions, Belair Entertainment, and Warner Bros, co-penned the Tony-nominated musical “Pump Boys And Dinettes,” published fiction and nonfiction, including his first book, Screenwriting Behind Enemy Lines: Lessons from Inside the Studio Gates. He currently works as Executive Producer for Cloud Imperium Games which is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest crowd funding effort in history. He recently executive produced the films Shaquile O’Neal Presents Foster Boy with Matthew Modine and Lou Gossett Jr., written and produced by his student Jay Paul Deratany; and The Great 14th: Tenzin Gyatzo, The 14th Dalai Lama, In His Own Words. John is also part of the core screenwriting faculty at the University of California at Riverside’s Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, providing not just an insight into how to write screenplays, but how to write screenplays that sell.

Mark Haskell Smith is the author of six novels with one word titles including Moist, Baked, and Blown; and the nonfiction books Rude Talk In Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer’s Journey through Greece, Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist's Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World and Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup. He has written extensively for film and television. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Independent, Vulture and others. His next book, Memoir: a Novel, will be out in 2024.

David L. Ulin  is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. He is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the literary journal Air/Light. Most recently, he has edited Didion: The 1960s and 70s and Didion: The 1980s and 90s for Library of America. His next book, Thirteen Question Method, will be out this fall.