LISA ALVAREZ's essays and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, OC Weekly, Santa Monica Review and in the anthologies Latinos in Lotusland and Geography of Rage. She has work forthcoming in the anthology, Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, to be published by Norton in 2010. Together with Alan Cheuse, she edited Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction. She is a professor of English at Irvine Valley College. With Louis B. Jones, she directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

GREG BILLS is the author of the novels Consider This Home and Fearful Symmetry. His stories and essays have appeared recently in the anthology Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, in the Spring 2010 Santa Monica Review, and in the upcoming Red Issue of Fairy Tale Review. Greg is a graduate of the MFA program in writing at UC Irvine, an alumnus of the Community of Writers Screenwriting Program, and currently teaches fiction at the University of Redlands in Southern California.

MAX BYRD is the author of a number of detective novels including California Thriller, which won the Shamus Award and, more recently, the historical novels Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant. Bantam published his most recent novel, Shooting the Sun. He is a Contributing Editor for the Wilson Quarterly.

MARK CHILDRESSis the author of the novels A World Made of Fire, V for Victor, Tender, Crazy in Alabama, Gone for Good, One Mississippi, and the forthcoming Georgia Bottoms, to be published in late 2010. He has also written three books for children, the screenplay for the Venice Film Festival-featured selection Crazy in Alabama, and is adapting the Margot Berwin novel Hothouse Flower to the screen for Columbia Pictures. www.markchildress.com

JOHN DANIEL is the author of three memoirs and two books of personal essays, as well as two collections of poems. His most recent work is The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has been awarded an NEA fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, two Oregon Book Awards in literary nonfiction, and a Pushcart Prize, among other honors. He has taught as writer-in-residence at colleges and universities around the country. www.johndaniel-author.net

GILL DENNIS was, with Tom Rickman, founding Director of the Community of Writers Screenwriting Program. He wrote the movie Walk the Line with James Mangold, and is currently writing a screenplay with the director Azazal Jacobs and adapting A.L. Kennedy’s novel Day for the screen with the author. Forever, which he wrote with Tatia Pilieva, will be produced in 2010. He won the L.A. Drama Critic’s Circle Award for Distinguished Direction in Theatre.

LOUIS EDWARDS is the author of three novels: Ten Seconds, N, and Oscar Wilde Discovers America. He has been honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Whiting Writer’s Award. Mr. Edwards is the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Public Relations for Festival Productions, Inc.-New Orleans which produces the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and other special events.

GLEN DAVID GOLD is the author of Carter Beats the Devil, a national bestseller currently translated into 14 languages. His fiction, essays and memoirs have appeared in Playboy, McSweeney's, The Independent UK and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and he has written comic books for DC and Dark Horse. His novel Sunnyside was published by Knopf in 2009. www.glendavidgold.com

SANDS HALL is the author of the novel Catching Heaven; recent stories have appeared in the Iowa Review and Green Mountains Review. Her work as a playwright includes a stage adaptation of Alcott’s Little Women and the comic drama “Fair Use.” She is also the author of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft, and has an essay in the anthology Writers Workshop in a Book. Her story, "Hide & Go Seek," was selected as one of "100 Other Notable Stories" by Great American Short Stories 2009. Sands is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
www.sandshall.com

GERALD HASLAM's most recent works are a collection of short pieces, Haslam's Valley (Heyday Books, 2005) and a novel, Grace Period (U. of Nevada Press, 2006). He has published nine collections of short fiction, four novels, three essay collections, three nonfiction books, and many shorter pieces. His work has won honors as varied as Rolling Stone's Ralph J. Gleason Award, a Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, a Commonwealth Club Medal, and a Western States' Book Award. His next book, a biography of Senator S.I. Hayakawa, will be published this fall. www.geraldhaslam.com

MICHAEL JAIME-BECERRA is the author of the short story collection Every Night Is Ladies' Night, winner of a California Book Award for a First Work of Fiction, and This Time Tomorrow, a novel. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

LOUIS B. JONESis the author of the novels Ordinary Money, Particles and Luck, and California's Over, all three New York Times Notable Books. His stories or nonfiction have appeared this year in the 2009 Pushcart Prize collection, in The Sun, and in Open City. With Lisa Alvarez, he directs the Writers Workshops of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. www.louisbjones.com

TERESA JORDAN is the author of five books about the American West including the memoir, Riding the White Horse Home, and has edited two anthologies including The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West. With her husband, Hal Cannon, she created the series, “The Open Road,” for the public radio show, The Savvy Traveler.www.teresajordan.com

MICHELLE LATIOLAIS is professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of the novel Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Bellevue Literary Press published her second novel, A Proper Knowledge, in spring 2008. She has published stories and essays in several literary journals.

JOANNE MESCHERY has published short stories, essays, and the novels, In A High Place, A Gentleman's Guide to the Frontier, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and Home and Away. She is also the author of a book of nonfiction, Truckee.

MARTIN J. SMITH, is editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine in Newport Beach, California, and was senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine for eight years. He is co-author, with Patrick J. Kiger, of OOPS: 20 Life Lessons From the Fiascoes That Shaped America (Collins) and POPLORICA: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America (HarperResource). Smith also is the author of many short stories and three thematically linked suspense thrillers published by Berkley, Time Release, Shadow Image, and Edgar Award-finalist Straw Men. mysite.verizon.net

GREGORY SPATZ’s most recent novel isFiddler’s Dream. He is also the author of a short story collection, Wonderful Tricks (winner of the Washington State Book Award), and his stories have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Iowa Review, Northwest Review,Epoch, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. Most recently, his novella “Time Trials”appeared in the Santa Monica Review. He teaches in and directs the MFA program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University, The Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and moonlights as the fiddler in the Juno Award- and Canadian Folk Award-nominated bluegrass band, John Reischman and the Jaybirds, as well as in the world folk-alt stringband, Mighty Squirrel.

LUIS ALBERTO URREA, Pulitzer Prize finalist and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is the best-selling author of 13 books, including The Hummingbird's Daughter, The Devil's Highway and Across the Wire. Recipient of an American Book Award, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize, Lannan Literary Award and a Western States Book Award, Urrea has published extensively in all of the major genres. His most recent book is Into The Beautiful North. A graphic novel based on his short story, “Mr.Mendoza's Paintbrush” is also due this summer. Both The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Devil's Highway have been optioned for film. Mexican director Luis Mendoki is scheduled to begin shooting The Hummingbird's Daughter this fall with Antonio Banderas. Urrea is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
www.luisurrea.com

AL YOUNGwas California's poet laureate from 2005-2008. His most recent book, Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills and Frames (The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson) received the 2009 PEN-Oakland Award. Other books include Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry; Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons; the reprint of The Sound of Dreams Remembered, which received the 2002 American Book Award; African-American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology; and Mingus Mingus: Two Memoirs (with Janet Coleman). "Scene and Summary," an essay, appears in the anthology Writers Workshop in a Book. Young's honors include Guggenheim, Fulbright and NEA Fellowships, the Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Nonfiction, and many others. Currently a literature class, at the California College of the Arts, he is a judge for the 2010 PEN Faulkner Awards. www.alyoung.org

H. EMERSON BLAKE is Editor-in-Chief of Orion Magazine and former Editor-in-Chief of Milkweed Editions. Work he has edited has been nominated for or won many awards, including the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has taught writing to undergraduate and graduate students and he serves as a panelist/judge for several literary awards. www.orionmagazine.org

MICHAEL V. CARLISLE, a founder of InkWell Management, began his career at William Morris Agency. His authors have won Pulitzer Prizes, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the British Book Award, LA Times Book Award, and the PEN Award for First Nonfiction; one even has an asteroid named for her. He is a former director of the AAR, a not-for-profit organization of independent literary and dramatic agents, and a member of PEN.

ANN CLOSE is a Senior Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Her fiction authors include Sarah Bird, Jay Cantor, James D. Houston, Gish Jen, Brad Leithauser, Jane Mendelsohn, Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Norman Rush. She is the recipient of the Roger Klein Award for Editorial Excellence.

HENRY DUNOW began his career as a literary agent in the early 1980s, with stints at Curtis Brown Ltd. and Harold Ober Associates before founding his own agency in 1997, which has since evolved into Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. He works primarily with quality fiction – literary, historical, strongly written commercial – and with voice-driven nonfiction across a range of areas – narrative history, biography, memoir, current affairs, cultural trends and criticism, science, sports, etc. Over the years he’s discovered and introduced a number of new, younger writers who’ve gone on to become established literary voices – and is particularly proud of that. He is the author The Way Home, a memoir about fatherhood.

BJ ROBBINSopened her Los Angeles-based literary agency in 1992 after a multifaceted book publishing career in New York at Simon & Schuster and Harcourt. Her clients include award-winning novelists James D. Houston, Max Byrd, Nafisa Haji, John Hough, Jr., Eduardo Santiago, and nonfiction writers J. Maarten Troost and James Donovan.

GEOFF SHANDLER is the Editor in Chief of Little, Brown and Company. Among the many writers he has edited are Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Safran Foer, John le Carré, William Least Heat-Moon, Luis Alberto Urrea, Robert Dallek, Juliet Barker, and James Bradley. He has taught at NYU and written for a number of publications, including the New Yorker, the American Scholar, Wired, Slate and is currently a junior correspondent for the Montclair Co-operative School parent newsletter.

JANET SILVER is the Literary Director of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth agency. She brings more than three decades of experience as an editor and publishing executive to her work as a literary agent. She joined the agency after 25 years at Houghton Mifflin Company, where she was Vice President and Publisher. Silver’s clients are writers of the highest quality fiction and narrative nonfiction, including memoir, biography, history, philosophy, and science, as well as noted journalists, scholars, and poets. The roster of novelists whose work she acquired and edited includes Philip Roth, Tim O’Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anita Desai, John Edgar Wideman, and Robert Stone. Two of her authors won the Pulitzer Prize: Lahiri in 2001 for her debut story collection Interpreter of Maladies and poet Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard in 2007. Many of the novelists she discovered won national awards and honors, including Monique Truong (The Book of Salt) and Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl). She is a trustee of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts and serves on the advisory board of Ploughshares magazine.

MARTIN J. SMITH, is editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine in Newport Beach, California, and was senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine for eight years. He is co-author, with Patrick J. Kiger, of OOPS: 20 Life Lessons From the Fiascoes That Shaped America (Collins) and POPLORICA: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America (HarperResource). Smith also is the author of many short stories and three thematically linked suspense thrillers published by Berkley, Time Release, Shadow Image, and Edgar Award-finalist Straw Men.

ANDREW TONKOVICHis the editor of the Santa Monica Review. His short stories, essays and commentaries have appeared in Faultline, OC Weekly, the Los Angeles Times and an anthology, Geography of Fear. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress, Being Mr. Right, appeared in Green Mountains Review. He has taught at UC Irvine, UC Irvine Extension, Santa Monica College, Irvine Valley College and University of Redlands. He hosts “Bibliocracy,” a weekly book culture program on Pacifica Radio affiliate KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, which focuses on literary fiction and nonfiction. http://bibliocracyradio.blogspot.com

Jordan Bass is the managing editor of McSweeney's Publishing, where he's helped to edit and design dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction, since 2004. His main focus is McSweeney’s Quarterly, a short-story journal which he oversees; McSweeney’s has published work by George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, Stephen King, Lydia Davis, and hundreds of other writers. Several stories Jordan has selected and edited for the journal have gone on to appear in the Best American Short Stories and receive the National Magazine Award for fiction.

RHODA HUFFEYis the author of the novel The Hallelujah Side. She has published stories in Tin House, Ploughshares, and Green Mountains Review.

DIANE JOHNSON is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction including the trilogy, Le Mariage, Le Divorce, and L’Affaire. Her essay appears in the anthology Writers Workshop in a Book. She is a two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Dutton published her most recent novel, Lulu in Marrakech, in 2008.

DAVID LUKASis a naturalist and writer whose writings have appeared in Audubon, Orion, Sunset, and Wild Bird, and in a weekly column in the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Watchable Birds of the Great Basin and Wild Birds of California. He revised the classic guidebook Sierra Nevada Natural History (UC Press) and just wrote a book for Lonely Planet called A Year of Watching Wildlife. http://www.sierranaturalist.com

MALCOLM MARGOLIN is the founder of Heyday Books, established in 1974. The mission of Heyday Books is to deepen people’s appreciation and understanding of California’s cultural, natural, historic, literary, and artistic resources. In his role as publisher Mr. Margolin has supported the revitalization of Native American language, dance, basketweaving, storytelling, and religious practice. Mr. Margolin is the author of four books, the best known of them being The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.

ALICE SEBOLD is the author of Lucky, a memoir, and the novels, The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon. www.barclayagency.com

AMY TAN’s novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers. An opera based on The Bonesetter's Daughter, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered in San Francisco in 2008. She has also published a memoir, The Opposite of Fate; two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa; and numerous articles for magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic. Tan's work has been widely anthologized and translated into 35 languages. www.redroom.com

Each summer, recently published alumni are invited to return to Squaw Valley to read from their books and talk about their journey from unpublished writers to published authors.

Recent alumni who have been part of this reading series include Anita Amirrezvani, David Bajo, Aimee Bender, David Corbett, Charmaine Craig, Frances Dinkelspiel, Cai Emmons, Alex Espinoza, Joshua Ferris, Jamie Ford, Vicki Forman, Tanya Egan Gibson, Glen David Gold, Judith Hendricks, Rhoda Huffey, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Regina Louise, Christina Meldrum, Janis Cooke Newman, Frederick Reiken, Robin Romm, Elizabeth Rosner, Adrienne Sharp, Alice Sebold, Julia Flynn Siler, Jordan Fisher Smith, Ellen Sussman, Lisa Tucker, Brenda Rickman Vantrease, and Andrew Winer among others.

2009 ALUMNI READERS

MARISA MATARAZZO is the author of Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her stories have been published in Faultline and Hobart. She attended the Community of Writers on a UC Irvine MFA Program Scholarship in 2006.

NAMI MUN is the author of the debut novel, Miles from Nowhere, which was shortlisted for the Orange Award, and selected for Booklist Editor’s Choice, Booklist Top Ten First Novels, Amazon’s Best Fiction of 2009 So Far, and Indie Next. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and other journals. Named Best New Novelist of 2009 by Chicago magazine, she is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a 2009 Whiting Award. She attended the Community of Writers in 2002, and currently teaches creative writing in Chicago. http://www.namimun.com

VICTORIA PATTERSON’s essays and short stories have appeared in various publications and literary journals, including the Los Angeles Times, Orange Coast Magazine, the Southern Review, Santa Monica Review, and the Florida Review. Her short story “Johnny Hitman” was selected as a notable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2009. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her collection of interlinked short stories, Drift, in June 2009. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She attended the Community of Writers in 2006. www.victoriapatterson.net

ALIA YUNIS' novel The Night Counter was published by Random House in 2009. It was also chosen as a top summer read by the Chicago Tribune and Boston Phoenix. A PEN Emerging Voice Fellow born in Chicago, she has worked as a filmmaker and journalist in the Middle East and the United States. Her fiction has been published in many journals and anthologies, and her nonfiction work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, SportsTravel Magazine, and Aramco World. She currently teaches film and television at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. www.aliayunis.com

DORA CALOTT WANG, M.D., is the author of a memoir, The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead), about the medical profession becoming the health care industry. She has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation writer’s residency. She attended the Community of Writers in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2005.