The Write Process

Blending personal narrative and investigative reporting, Emmy Award-winning journalist Cole Kazdin reveals that disordered eating is an epidemic crisis killing millions of women. Women of all ages struggle with disordered eating, preoccupation with food, and body anxiety. Journalist Cole Kazdin was one such woman, and she set out to discover why her own full recovery from an eating disorder felt so impossible. Interviewing women across the country as well as the world's most renowned researchers, she discovered that most people with eating disorders never receive treatment––the fact that she did made her one of the lucky ones. Kazdin takes us to the doorstep of the diet industry and research community, exposing the flawed systems that claim to be helping us, and revealing disordered eating for the crisis that it is: a mental illness with the second highest mortality rate (after opioid-related deaths) that no one wants to talk about. Along the way, she identifies new treatments not yet available to the general public, grass roots movements to correct racial disparities in care, and strategies for navigating true health while still living in a dysfunctional world. What's Eating Us is an urgent battle cry coupled with stories and strategies about what works and how to finally heal—for real. Cole Kazdin is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety (St. Martin's Press 2023). Selected as a Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read, the book blends personal narrative and investigative reporting to reveal disordered eating as an epidemic crisis killing millions of women. Cole has written for TIME, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, MEL Magazine, and more, and was a regular contributor to VICE. She has produced television for Good Morning America, Nightline and World News Tonight. Cole has told stories live on The Moth's Mainstage across the country, The Moth Radio Hour on NPR,, and has performed storytelling all over Southern California where she is a proud, three-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. Her solo performances have garnered national praise and been optioned for film. A contributing author to the bestselling book, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, she coaches and teaches writers all over the world, as well as leading workshops and classes for corporations and universities and currently teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

Lena Nelson is a writer, teacher and citizen historian who has spent seventeen years researching and documenting the story of Samantha Smith and creating www.SamanthaSmith.info, the online archive of news articles and videos about Samantha Smith. She was a nominee for the Allegra Johnson Prize and has worked with numerous news, educational, and humanitarian organizations around the world. She lives with her family in Southern California. America's Youngest Ambassador: The Cold War Story of Samantha Smith's Lasting Message of Peace, explores how nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union in 1982. Samantha Smith, a fifth grader from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey that helped transform the hearts and minds of two nations on a collision course.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, she's received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, Jentel, and National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with Gettysburg National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, On Being's Poetry Unbound, and the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). Her poetry and essays can be found at Acentos Review, Huizache, LA Review of Books, The Offing, [Pank], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. She is the director of Women Who Submit. Inspired by her Chicana identity, she works to cultivate love and comfort in chaotic times. At the heart of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press 2023) lies an exploration of love in its many forms. Bermejo crafts poems that celebrate the enduring bonds of family, the unwavering strength of compassion, and the necessity for defiance. "Bermejo's Incantation do more than conjure hope for a vague future; they demand accountability and enact the healing we need now," writes award-winning author Carribean Fragoza. These poems dance like flames in rituals of resistance and resilience, casting light on paths that lead to a future unburdened by the chains of misogyny, white supremacy, and state-sanction violence.

Elba Iris Pérez is from Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and spent her early childhood in Woronoco, Massachusetts. She taught theatre and history at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo, and now lives in Houston. Her debut novel, The Things We Didn't Know, was an instant USA TODAY bestseller and the inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster's Books Like Us First Novel Contest. She is also the author of El teatro como bandera, a history of street theater in Puerto Rico. The USA TODAY bestselling inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster's Books Like Us contest, Elba Iris Pérez's “wonderfully compelling” cross-cultural coming-of-age debut novel explores a young girl's childhood between 1950s Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts factory town. As Andrea navigates the rifts between her family's values and all-American culture, she must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood.

Kelli McNeil-Yellen is a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Drama. Her first feature, The Baltimore School of Charm, won first place at the UCLA Extension Feature Film Screenwriting Contest and was a top 15% finisher in the Academy's Nicholl Awards. Most recently, she's been screening her authentically cast feature film, DARUMA, on the festival circuit. After two sold-out screenings at Slamdance in 2024, two-time Oscar winner Peter Farrelly joined the film as executive producer to raise the visibility of the film and called it "great". She is repped by Dannie Festa of World Builder Entertainment. CNN called DARUMA the first film to star two leads with a disability in a narrative not about overcoming a disability. The film recently completed a successful festival run with two sold-out screenings at Slamdance. DARUMA is a heartbreaking but uplifting dramedy and ultimately a story about friendship, fatherhood and found family.

Teresa Yang, DDS is the author of the award-winning book, Nothing But The Tooth: An Insider's Guide to Dental Health. She has practiced dentistry for over 30 years. Yang has taught clinical dentistry and patient management at UCLA School of Dentistry, where she is a member of the Board of Counselors. She is also a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board and has written extensively on dental topics. Dr. Yang lives in Los Angeles, California. Have you ever visited a new dentist and been told you need a “smile makeover,” with the implication that if your teeth were whiter and straighter, you would be more successful and happier? Or maybe you've never had a cavity – and now, you have a half dozen that require immediate attention. Root canal, crown, or implant: which procedure is best for your situation? NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH is a ready guide to dental health. It begins with the most important question: how to choose a competent and ethical dentist – and ends with a discussion about technological advances in the dental field. Let this book help you communicate better with your dentist.

Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry's Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Randolph College. And Not / And Yet comprises a series of poems exploring death, foreignness, ancestry, and form through the lens of Buddhist scripture, specifically texts that detail a person's harrowing journey as they transition away from the realm of the living.

Michael Jann is an Emmy-nominated late-night comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for over two decades. Michael teaches screenwriting at UCLA-Extension. He co-wrote and co-produced the short animated film Bug Therapy (www.bugtherapy.film). It's a story about a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood. This story is deeply personal: Mike's son suffered a severe mental-breakdown at age 29, resulting in hospitalizations and psych wards. His ongoing recovery (fingers crossed) has fueled Mike's passion to fight the stigma of mental illness. Mike lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and writing partner Michele Jourdan. Michele's the funny one; Mike's the pretty one. In Bug Therapy, Citronella, a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood, nervously waits outside her first group therapy session, while the Pill Bug therapist, Dr. Pill tries to calm a neurotic group of bugs, each suffering from a mental-health issue: An OCD germaphobic Fly freaks when he runs out of hand sanitizer. A Dragonfly couple struggle with co-dependency; she's literally on top of him. A Grasshopper, addicted to coffee, is so jumpy, he launches himself in mid-sentence. A Praying Mantis who doesn't pray because she thinks she is God. A terrified Spider is deathly afraid of -- spiders. And, a perfectly-camouflaged Stick Bug complains that no one ever "sees" him. Throughout all this, Citronella battles her urge to flee - while Dr. Pill implores her to share her "embarrassing" problem.

Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her MA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA. In Sylvia's Second Act, Sylvia's husband's cheating on her. She hates Boca. Sylvia is mad and she isn't going to take it anymore. She's moving back to the city of her dreams—with her best friend, Evie, in tow. When sixty-three-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with the floozy of their retirement community, she's shocked and furious...at first. Sylvia realizes that actually, this isn't what she wants anymore. So she enlists her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, to join her in setting up a new life in Manhattan. Sylvia doesn't want to be twenty-five again. Her age gives her wisdom, experience, and perspective. A career, sex, fun, and a new romance—her entire second act is stretched out in front of her.

I Was a Teenage Dominatrix is the true story of one woman's quest for self-education, in academia and beyond. Kenney wrote a sex work memoir before the term ‘sex work' was commonplace, unwittingly becoming part of what the New York Times dubbed the ‘sex work literati' of the early 2000s. Shawna is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, and most recently, Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation's Capital 1988-1998 (Rare Bird Books) Her arts journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Pitchfork, Vice, Bust and more. She serves as a Contributing Editor with Narratively Magazine and leads international writing retreat Hamlet's Hideaway in Denmark every summer.

Jarrod Shusterman is the New York Times and international bestselling author of Dry, Roxy and Retro. His collaboration in Gleanings, the fourth installment of the bestselling Scythe trilogy, is being adapted for the screen by Universal. He writes for the screen and teaches courses at UCLA in creative writing. Sofía Lapuente is an author, screenwriter, professor at UCLA, and avid world traveler who immigrated from Spain to the United States to realize her dream of storytelling. Jarrod and Sofía have a passion for collaborative storytelling across many mediums, with love and multiculturalism as an ethos, and enjoy traveling the world and learning new languages. Since then, she has worked as a producer and casting director on an Emmy nominated show. They've received starred reviews, from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Blooklist and more! In the novel Retro, Things were never supposed to get this out of hand. When Luna receives an opportunity to win a scholarship to the college of her dreams, she's all in. It's called the Retro Challenge, where contestants live without modern technology. At first, the challenge is fun. But then things get dangerous. Kids start disappearing, including Luna's friends. There are voices in the woods. Markings on the trees. Secrets. Lies. Betrayal. The weight of her family on her shoulders. There's so much on the line for Luna, and she's falling in love with the last guy she expected. Unless she can figure out the truth behind who's sabotaging the challenge, the next person to disappear may be Luna herself.

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre writer, she has published work in New England Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and several journals and anthologies. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting her manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” Daniel's transcontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022), was People's Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. An alumna of Yale University and the University of Michigan's Writers' MFA, she turns to her third and fourth books, supported by fellowships from Brown University and Cave Canem. Holding a PhD from USC, she is recalled to California for the third time as the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. In the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Mary-Alice Daniel confronts culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals animate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, the poems stray inside speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It engineers an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.

Jeff Bonnett is a writer/filmmaker who began his career in Hollywood as a script reader. From there, his first pitch and subsequent screenplay became a film released on the Hallmark channel in 2015, titled “Love by the Book”. His latest screenplay, “Falling for Christmas” was released on Netflix last November, where it premiered at #1, was in Netflix's Top Ten movie list in 92 countries, and was the top U.S. streaming movie across all platforms in its second week running. Before the holiday season ended, it had been viewed over 78 million times globally. Dubbed by IndieWire as “the Citizen Kane of Netflix Christmas movies”, Falling for Christmas is about a newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress who suffers from amnesia after a skiing accident, and finds herself in the care of a down-on-his-luck widower and his daughter at their quaint ski lodge in the days leading up to Christmas.

Nancy Pine holds a PhD in Education and is a professor emerita at Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles, where she directed the Elementary Education Program and the Bridging Cultures US/China Program. She has done cross-cultural research in China and the United States for over 20 years, has published over 30 education and research articles, many related to China or cross-cultural learning and has given talks and workshops throughout the United States and internationally. Dr. Pine has spent extended periods in rural China, including five lengthy visits to one village to teach teachers from neighboring communities, consult in the local school and learn about rural life. Her recent book, One in a Billion: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey through Modern-Day China, grew from that experience and challenged her to move from academic to narrative writing. One in a Billion is a powerful account of how one stubborn, hardworking Chinese man has lived by his values, stood up for his convictions and succeeded against all odds in the authoritarian environment of China. Despite grinding poverty, hunger, reeducation campaigns and attacks from jealous peers, An Wei has launched one innovative project after another, including a democratic congress in his own village. Resilient to the core, he has continuously worked to overcome corruption, improve the world and build understanding between China and the West. As tensions rise over human rights in China and potential military threats grow, An Wei's story becomes ever more significant.

Denise Cruz-Castino is a Latina screenwriter whose first produced movie, 5 Weddings premiered at Cannes in 2018. It starred Rajkummar Rao of the Oscar nominated film The White Tiger, with co-stars Bo Derek and Candy Clark, and played in 52 countries. Her latest animated children's horror shorts that she sold to DreamworksTV are on Peacock's streaming series Spine Chilling Stories. She sold a live action short, The Fountain, to Disney, her horror short, Imaginary Friends, was produced by Raving Eejit Entertainment, and did the festival circuits. Her comedy short, Things Look Grim was produced by Sasha Goldberg. She and her writing partner Johnny Harrington have a sitcom about Denise's crazy family that's Mexican on one side and Jewish on the other that's currently in development. She's getting ready to go into production to direct her first short in 2023 for a strong female lead dramedy. Her scripts have placed in Final Draft Big Break, Fade-In Screenwriting and Nicholl's Fellowship contests. 5 Weddings follows an American journalist, who travels to India to cover Bollywood weddings. Interwoven with the joy and fun of these traditional ceremonies, the film goes beyond the fluff -- to explore the human component of Hijras: a sect of transgender dancers who have been an integral part of Indian weddings for centuries.

Sana Balagamwala grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied English Literature at the University of Southern California, and has a Masters in Education from Loyola Marymount University. Her debut novel, House Number 12, Block Number 3 was published by Hidden Shelf Publishing House in 2021 and won the Foreword Indies Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. It has also been nominated for the Martin Cruz Smith Award by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her family and is currently working towards her MSt. in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. House Number 12 Block Number 3 narrates the story of a young woman's journey towards confrontation and healing. Nadia, 19, has long struggled with bouts of unresolved illness and trauma as a result of assault she experienced as a child. But unable to share her truth, Nadia keeps her tragic secret to herself. Her family, unable to find a reason for her illness begin to wonder if she is possessed by a jinn, cursed, or worse, inclined to madness. House Number 12, the house she lives in, is the only witness to the crime that has all but devastated her, and narrates her story. The novel explores gender roles, and the misinformation and social taboos that surround mental illness and sexual violence in many South Asian cultures, and shines a light on both the personal and the political, as it chronicles a time period in Pakistani history riddled with political strife.

Tamika is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is author of speculative fiction collection, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of horror novella Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has producing credits at Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, as well as at NBC and ABC News. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at tamikathompson.com and on Twitter and Slasher @tamikathompson. Unshod, Cackling, and Naked A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she's not free to break her pose. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die?

Julia Camara is a Brazilian writer/filmmaker. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, she freelanced for years as a Portuguese translator for film and television subtitling. She has written and directed several award-winning short films. Her feature directorial debut In Transit, an experimental drama shot mostly in one day and with improvised dialogue, won Best Experimental Film at four different festivals. Julia also wrote the sci-fi feature Area Q (starring Isaiah Washington), the road movie Open Road (starring Andy Garcia, Juliette Lewis and Camilla Belle. Julia teaches Screenwriting at UCLA Extension Writers' Program and works as an advisor for Sundance Co//ab. Stronghold is a feature film about a mother-daughter duo living alone in a post-apocalyptic world. This indie thriller is written and directed by Julia Camara. Written in 2012 before the pandemic, this almost prophetic story captures the feeling of isolation the world felt during the 2020 lockdown.

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia served social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, she currently serves as faculty in The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension and Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine. Synopsis: In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation. In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power sought to destroy. Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited.

Keyonna Taylor got her break into the television industry as a staff writer on the Apple + hit workplace comedy Mythic Quest. There she penned Breaking Brad, starring Snoop Doggy Dogg. Next, she got the absolute privilege of working as story editor in the longest running live action comedy of our time, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Writing on IASIP she co-wrote The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7, the third in The Gangs trilogy of remakes of the 1987 American buddy cop action comedy franchise. In 2020 Keyonna teamed up with Rob McElhenney and sold her first show to FX, titled MeWe. An anthology that gives you a snapshot into the lives of Americans killed by systemic racism. Keyonna is also Chief Creative Officer at Adim. Adim is a community of storytellers, fans, and friends working together to create and own the next generation of content, in order to build a more inclusive future for entertainment and a new era of creativity for us all. We are about to kick the door of mainstream creativity down and let anyone in. No gatekeeping. Adim is a space for any and all creators to share their ideas, create collaboratively, and come together to see their ideas bloom. We are facilitating the next generation of storytelling, utilizing technology to enhance our characters and track creator ownership. Adim hopes to allow all dreamers to create faster, engage with their creations more, and interact with that of others on a global scale.

Kristin Griffith is a writer, LGBTQ+ advocate, and product marketing consultant in the tech industry. She has several publications, including the book, Rush: Memoir of a Gay Sorority Girl, which has been featured in The Sorority Life and the Kappa Alpha Theta Magazine, and is currently being adapted into a feature film. Other publications include In Your Eyes (featured in “Secret Sisters: Stories of Being Lesbian and Bisexual in a College Sorority”) and her work was featured in the Journal of Applied Psychology (“The disclosure dilemma for gay men and lesbians: "Coming out" at work”). Kristin is currently working on two feature film screenplays, both romances showcasing queer female characters. She holds an MBA in Marketing from UCLA Anderson School of Management and has worked in tech companies including Meta, Intuit, Netflix, PayPal, and Adobe. Currently, Kristin volunteers for the Trevor Project and lives in Oakland with her wife and rescue dog. Book Synopsis: Rush: Memoir of a Gay Sorority Girl is an emotional roller coaster of a story about a shy girl from Texas who, in her quest for love and belonging, struggles with her sexual orientation and gender expression within the confines of sorority life at a Midwestern university. This memoir offers an exclusive peek into sorority and fraternity culture: rushing, pledging, initiation, partying, drinking, hooking up—and homophobia. Kristin lets us intimately witness her coming-out journey: drama with guys, fumbles with girls, romance with a female teacher; angst from keeping secrets; coming out in the student newspaper; the confidence of being out, along with the pain of being rejected for it. It's about falling down and standing tall, as we figure out who we are, and who we want to be.

Shiwani Srivastava was raised on Bollywood films and the rom-coms of the 1980s. She writes screenplays examining relationships, family dynamics, and immigrant experiences through the lens of comedy, drawing on her work as a journalist and her family's roots in India. Her romantic comedy WEDDING SEASON was released by Netflix this summer, where it debuted as one of their Top 5 films worldwide. Srivastava, repped by A3 Artists and Affirmative Entertainment, was named one of Variety's 10 Screenwriters to Watch in 2022. She has projects in development with Paramount, ReelFx, Gunpowder & Sky, and Samosa Stories. A native of New Jersey, she received a BA in English and Journalism from NYU and an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she currently lives with her family and their overstuffed bookshelves. SYNOPSIS WEDDING SEASON is an American romantic comedy directed by Tom Dey. Starring Suraj Sharma and Pallavi Sharda, it follows the story of Asha and Ravi, two Indian-Americans who are being pressured by their parents to find spouses. They pretend to date to survive a summer of weddings, only to find themselves falling for each other… and finally getting the courage to be their true selves. The script was written by Shiwani Srivastava as a spec and landed in the hands of a Netflix executive after winning the ScreenCraft Comedy Contest in 2018.

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His debut won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for the year's top novel. The Lager Queen of Minnesota won the WILLA Literary Award and was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. His third and newest novel is Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in California with his family. There are few public settings more unique to the northern Midwest than the supper club, and J. Ryan Stradal's new novel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, is his love letter to them and to the people who made them their home away from home. In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, filled with honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters, two restaurant families over three generations grapple with love, loss, and marriage, and what our legacy will be when we are gone.

Iris Yamashita is an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter for the movie Letters from Iwo Jima. She has been working in Hollywood for fifteen years and continues to develop for both film and streaming media. She has taught screenwriting at UCLA and is an advocate of women and diversity in the entertainment industry. City Under One Roof is her debut novel. She lives in California. In City Under One Roof, a stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone lives in a single high-rise building. When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own motives for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel. After a blizzard causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stuck among the odd and suspicious residents of the town—all 205 of whom live in the same high-rise building and are as icy as the weather. Cara teams up with Point Mettier police officer Joe Barkowski, but before long the investigation is upended by fearsome gang members from a nearby native village. Haunted by her past, Cara soon discovers that everyone in this town has something to hide. Will she be able to unravel their secrets before she herself unravels?

Lou Mathews has written seven books and published two of them, Just Like James and L.A. Breakdown, an LA Times Best Book. He has taught in UCLA Extension's acclaimed creative writing program since 1989. His stories have been published in ZYZZYVA, New England Review, Short Story, Black Clock , Paperback L.A. , and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, and passionate cook, as well as a former mechanic, street racer, and restauranthttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Y2A9687.jpg/1200px-Y2A9687.jpg critic. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as California Arts Commission and NEA Fiction fellowships, and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards. Welcome to Shaky Town, a place invisible on maps and found only in the secret heart of its citizens. In his second novel, Lou Mathews, a former mechanic and street racer, captures the grit and gold of working class Los Angeles and lays down his marker as one of the city's great chroniclers. He tells his tale in a cool and panoramic style, weaving together the tragedies and glories of one east side neighborhood in the 1980s. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war, to an Irish priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous faultline but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.

Catherine Klatzker is a retired pediatric ICU nurse, mother of three, and mental health advocate. Her personal essays have been published in multiple journals as well as her contributions to two mental health anthologies. She currently resides and writes in Los Angeles, California, where she has taken numerous UCLA Extension Writing classes since 2000. Her memoir, You Will Never Be Normal, was released in May, 2021. It is her first book. In You Will Never Be Normal, Klatzker navigates through denial, dissociation, and grief to eventually arrive at acceptance and healing of her traumatic dissociative identity disorder (DID) and PTSD. Her journey forces her to reflect on her early childhood in the Midwest, growing up wholly dissociated from the molestation in her family with an alcoholic father and her twelve sisters and brothers. At sixteen, she escapes her chaotic home and moves in with an older man. By eighteen, Klatzker is widowed with an infant son. Three decades later find her resisting unbidden early memories and alarming inner voices. When she dissociates, or splits off from her self, she cannot stay with her self as one person. Traumatizing events, beginning in meditation, launch her into a therapy that extends over many extraordinary years as her dissociated identities, or “parts,” intrude with increasing boldness. In You Will Never Be Normal, Klatzker details the ways her alternate identities or “parts” were created and what each contributes to her life, set against the backdrop of her steady second marriage, work as an ICU pediatric nurse, a life filled with children, and a desire to hide her DID, until it becomes inexorably integrated into her whole identity. She finally believes the trauma of her past and the genius of having unconsciously created DID “parts” of herself to hold the intolerable. Klatzker cuts through stereotypes around DID. She normalizes it as a response to complex trauma and emphasizes the role that each “part” played in keeping her safe. This is a story that tackles themes of sexual abuse, family relationships, romantic relationships, self-harm and self-love, mental illness, therapy, and the two ends of human experience, love and death. It concludes as a deep investigation of self-compassion and the reconciliation of opposite realities. http://catherine.klatzker.com Instagram @toomanyparts Twitter @mettah4 Facebook https://www.facebook.com/klatzkerwriter/

Gabe Gabriel is a queer South African filmmaker based between Cape Town and Los Angeles where they have been working as a writer, director, actor, and independent film producer since 2013. Most recently, Gabe has penned such works as ‘Granny Lee', a feel-good South African dramedy about a real-life transgender icon ‘Mavis and Grace', a Thelma-and-Louise-type buddy cop Western,; ‘Sabela Gold', a 5-season gritty gold-rush crime, and ‘Mother City', a psycho-sexual neo-noir drama. In 2021, Gabe' made their directorial debut with South Africa's first gay romcom, ‘No Hiding Here', which is currently available for streaming on South Africa's premier streaming service: Showmax. Gabe's original works have placed them as a semi-finalist at the Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition, the Final Draft Big Break Contest, the 5th annual Screencraft Fellowship, and the CBS Writers Mentorship program. In Runs in the Family, reformed small-time con artist and single father Varun Chetty is called to break his long-lost ex girlfriend, Monica, out of a rehab clinic across the country. Varun and his transgender son, River, must road trip to her rescue and back, all in time for River to compete in the national talent show that could win him the cash for his long-awaited gender-affirming surgery, so long as no grifters from Varun's past get in their way.

Grace Perry is a Chicago-bred, Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared all over the internet, including on BuzzFeed, The Cut, The New Yorker, The Onion, Reductress, and much more. Her debut book. The 2000s Made Me Gay, was released on St. Martin's Press in 2021. The 2000s Made Me Gay (St. Martin's Press, 2021) is a humor-driven essay collection that interweaves queer memoir and pop culture criticism. Subjects include: how Taylor Swift's Fearless is a blueprint for U-Hauling; Seth Cohen as a lesbian role model; MTVs The Challenge on forming queer community, and much more.

María Amparo Escandón is a New York Times best-selling bilingual author. Her third novel, L.A. Weather is a Reese's Book Club pick and is featured on Oprah Quarterly as well as a Best Book of the Month in Barnes & Noble, People, CNN, E! News, and more. Her first novel, Esperanza's Box of Saints and its Spanish version, Santitos, has been the number one best seller in the Los Angeles Times Best Sellers List. It has 21 foreign editions and has been read in over 86 countries. Her books have been chosen as the annual book selection for several Community Reads public library-funded projects, like One City One Book, A Novel Idea. Many of her short stories have been published in journals and magazines, both in English and Spanish, and she has taught numerous Creative Writing courses and workshops at UCLA Extension since 1994. In LA Weather, Los Angeles is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He's harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters―Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers―are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way. With quick wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

Maria Gabriela Cardenas is a director, producer, and writer from Caracas, Venezuela. Her directorial debut A Dark Foe, a psychological thriller, garnered twenty awards and sixteen nominations and was distributed by Vertical Entertainment. Cardenas has done a variety of music videos, short films, including the award-winning short "The Grand Guignol" (2015). At the age of 14, she already knew she wanted to become a film director and committed to several intensive film courses in Los Angeles, California. Later, she earned a Bachelor's degree in filmmaking and a Master's degree in Producing. As a devoted fan of the film noir and thriller genres, Cardenas, along with her father, Oscar Cardenas, established a film production company, Path of Thorns Entertainment (TM). In A Dark Foe, a guilt-ridden FBI agent, stranded in the painful memory of the abduction of his sister, suffers from a rare condition known as Nyctophobia, an irrational fear of the dark, and will have to face-off with the cunning serial killer who took her away.

A man of duality, Tom Pinchuk has charted the adventures of world-famous kid heroes like Cartoon Network's Ben 10 and Mattel's Max Steel while also crafting mature audience comics for Heavy Metal Magazine, among other outlets. His recent graphic novel, Remember Andy Xenon, may reconcile these contradictions, at last. Tom has written for television, comics and everything in-between and, before moving to Los Angeles, dwelled everywhere from Singapore to Syracuse. He delights in obstacle races, escape rooms and in masterminding increasingly elaborate April Fools Day pranks. Awesome powers? Adventures all over the world? Andy Xenon was the boy hero every kid wished they could be! But then he turned 18 and those powers vanished. No more adventures. What happened? Why? Never getting any explanations, Andy resigned to life as a normal guy… and it's a quiet misery. Nobody believes he used to be Andy Xenon. People have moved on to new adventurers and, each year, fewer even remember Andy, at all...But one person hasn't forgotten. A journalist has tracked Andy down for a soul-searching interview. At last, he can set the record straight, review his reckless youth with hard-earned wisdom… and maybe figure out what went wrong. Is it too late for answers? Or can Andy earn a second chance? Remember Andy Xenon is anoff-beat journey of redemption. Sometimes the end of a story is only just the beginning.

Nadiya Chettiar started out as a stage actor and had the rare opportunity of touring as far away as Iran before discovering her true passion lay off the stage and behind the camera. She began her writing career in her native Canada, working for hit comedies such as Netflix's Kim's Convenience and Workin' Moms. After relocating to LA, Nadiya landed her first US gig as Executive Story Editor on Life in Pieces. She then moved on to the star-studded animated series, Housebroken, before returning to her stage roots in multi-cam form on Mom. She's currently a writer/producer on Young Sheldon, where she enjoys writing for one of the best ensembles on TV. Nadiya also loves playing basketball and hitting the beach with her pooch, Pee-wee. Young Sheldon Season 5, Ep 14: “A Free Scratcher and Feminine Wiles” Sheldon butts heads with Dr. Lee, a new scientist in the lab; Mary, a devout Southern Baptist, grapples with what to do when she's given a lotto ticket.

Pete Hsu is a Taiwanese American writer based in Pasadena, CA. He is the author of the experimental chapbook, There Is a Man (Tolsun Books). His work has also been featured in several journals and anthologies, including The Asian American Writer's Workshop's The Margins, F(r)iction, The Los Angeles Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He was a 2017 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as the 2017 PEN in the Community Writer in Residence. Full of warmth, terror, and unsentimental humor, If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home, Pete Hsu's debut story collection, captures the essence of survival in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for us—the pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsu's writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.

Tembi Locke is the New York Times bestselling author of her memoir From Scratch, an actor, producer, and screenwriter. From Scratch is a Reese's Book Club pick, an Audie Awards Best Audiobook Finalist, and a Goodreads Best Books Finalist. Along with Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine, Tembi serves as an executive producer and co-writer for the Netflix limited series inspired by her book. Her hope is for her work to inspire people to love more deeply, embrace resilience, and honor the fundamental humanity that connects us all. From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home is a poignant and transformative cross-cultural love story set against the lush backdrop of the Sicilian countryside, about how one woman discovered the healing powers of food, family and unexpected grace in her darkest hour. This New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and needed a reminder that life is, after all, delicious.

Jean Chen Ho is a writer and doctoral candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Fellow in fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her writing has been published in Guernica, The Rumpus, The Offing, Apogee, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, VIDA, NPR, Buzzfeed, Bitch Magazine, and others. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles. Fiona and Jane follows best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen, as they explore the lonely highways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts with them. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father's sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other's lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they've lost. Link to book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652717/fiona-and-jane-by-jean-chen-ho/ Socials: twitter.com/jeanho, instagram.com/jeanho66

Alexandra Alessandri is the author of Feliz New Year, Ava Gabriela! (Albert Whitman), which won a silver medal in the 2020 Florida Book Awards, and the forthcoming Isabel and Her Colores Go to School (Sleeping Bear Press). The daughter of Colombian immigrants, she is also an Associate Professor of English at Broward College and a poet, with some of her work appearing in The Acentos Review, Rio Grande Review, Atlanta Review, and Young Adult Review Network. She received her BA and MA degrees in English from Florida International University and a Certificate in Fiction Writing from UCLA Extension. When not writing or teaching, Alexandra spends her time daydreaming, relearning the piano, and planning the next great adventure with her family. She lives in Florida with her husband, son, and hairless pup, dreaming of Colombia. Feliz New Year, Ava Gabriela!, illustrated by Addy Rivera Sonda, is about a shy little girl, Ava Gabriela, who is visiting her extended family in Colombia for the holidays. She's excited to take part in family traditions, such as making buñuelos and saying goodbye to el Año Viejo, but being around all her loud relatives in an unfamiliar place makes Ava shy and quiet. How will she find her voice before she misses out on all the New Year's fun? Feliz New Year, Ava Gabriela! is an ode to Alexandra's culture and to shy kids everywhere. School Library Journal praised the book, saying “This warm #OwnVoices look at Colombian traditions is both universal and deeply personal...Sonda's charming illustrations portray an idyllic finca…[and] The language is just as atmospheric.” Booklist called the illustrations “vibrant,” while Kirkus Reviews awarded the book a starred review, saying, “This gentle family story lets readers know that shyness is nothing to worry about.” Social Media accounts: Twitter: https://twitter.com/apalessandri Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apalessandri/

Jennifer J. Chow is the Lefty Award-nominated author of the Sassy Cat Mysteries and the forthcoming L.A. Night Market Mysteries (Berkley/Penguin Random House). The first in the Sassy Cat series, Mimi Lee Gets A Clue, was selected as an Overdrive Recommended Read, a PopSugar Best Summer Beach Read, staff picks for both Richland Library and Changing Hands Bookstore, and as one of BuzzFeed's Top 5 Books by AAPI authors. Jennifer has also published other Asian-American novels involving secrets and mysteries. She's active in Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Crime Writers of Color. In Mimi Lee Cracks the Code, Pixie St. James, one of Mimi's pet grooming clients, has offered Mimi and her boyfriend, Josh, a getaway at her vacation home, nestled on beautiful Catalina Island. With the island just outside of Los Angeles but still far enough from the hustle and bustle, Mimi, Josh, and their cat Marshmallow (who, of course, wouldn't be caught dead in a dingy pet hotel) are excited for their relaxing stay. That is, until Pixie's last renter, Davis D. Argo, turns up dead. Mimi and Josh's romantic getaway immediately turns into an enormous buzzkill, especially when Pixie asks Mimi for help. The police suspect Pixie, and Mimi knows a thing or two about wrongful allegations. Mimi figures it couldn't hurt to snoop a little since she's already there, and soon discovers that a valuable item is missing. Except Pixie isn't the only one in the neighborhood who has been robbed. There is something strange happening on the island, and Mimi won't stop until she finds out what it is. Synopsis & Link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605898/mimi-lee-cracks-the-code-by-jennifer-j-chow/9781984805034/ When murder follows Mimi Lee to her romantic island getaway, she puts on her best sleuthing hat with her sassy cat in tow in this adventurous cozy mystery by Jennifer J. Chow. Social media: https://twitter.com/JenJChow https://www.instagram.com/jenjchow/ https://www.facebook.com/JenJChow

Darrin L. Dortch is a comedic writer, hailing from St. Louis, Missouri. His pilot, "Short Changed," won the inaugural Turner/American Black Film Festival TV Writing Contest in 2017. Darrin was a writer for two seasons on TNT's outrageously delicious dramedy "Claws." Darrin's first episode of "Claws" was also the directorial debut of star Niecy Nash. Currently, Darrin is an Executive Story Editor on Warner Bros./OWN's, "The Kings of Napa." He has written multiple pitches and spec scripts and is preparing to write his first book and a salacious podcast. Despite his raunchy sense of humor, Darrin has been a born-again Christian for nearly 30 years. In the Claws episode “Zaddy Was A Rolling Stone,” five diverse, hardworking manicurists try to make ends meet at the Nail Artisan of Manatee County salon in Central Florida, contending with a staid economy while managing perilous personal lives awash in drama. Amidst all the silk wraps, pedicures and polish treatments, salon owner Desna, who lives with and cares for her mentally ill twin brother, leads a staff that includes best friend Jennifer, now sober and raising two kids from a previous relationship; enigmatic Ann, who provides security for the salon; mild-mannered preppy and ex-convict Polly; and Virginia, who becomes easily bored and impatient with her job. Also hanging around the salon are shady redneck Roller; ambulance coach Bryce, Jennifer's husband who is also newly sober; and Uncle Daddy, a dangerous, deeply Catholic and actively bisexual crime boss. IG and Twitter at @LowBudgetLaughs.

Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She's the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and two cats. She is the author of NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR (Feiwel and Friends), TELL ME HOW YOU REALLY FEEL (Feiwel and Friends), THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT (Feiwel and Friends) and the forthcoming Reclaimed Classics ROBIN HOOD (March 1, 2022). In This is All Your Fault, Rinn, Daniella and Imogen clock into work at Wild Nights Bookstore on the first day of summer. They're expecting the hours to drift by the way they always do. Instead, they have to deal with the news that the bookstore is closing. Before the day is out, there'll be shaved heads, a diva author and a very large shipment of Air Jordans to contend with. It will take all three of them working together if they have any chance to save Wild Nights Bookstore. Social Media Accounts: @aminahmae on Instagram @aminahmae on Twitter (but mostly, I'm on Instagram)

Kenji C. Liu is author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019), finalist for the California and Maine book awards, and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His poetry is in numerous journals, anthologies, magazines, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). An alumnus of Kundiman, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Ángeles. Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. It also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today's dominant hypermasculinity.

Paria Hassouri is a pediatrician, mother of three, and transgender rights activist. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1999 and completed her residency training at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 2002. Her personal essays have been published in multiple sites, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post, and she has presented stories on stage through Expressing Motherhood. A proud Iranian-American, she spent her formative years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She currently resides and practices in Los Angeles, California. Her memoir, Found in Transition: A Mother's Evolution during her Child's Gender Change, was released in September 2020. In Found in Transition, Hassouri is blindsided when her teenager comes out as transgender. As Hassouri navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventually arrive at acceptance, her journey forces her to reflect on her own experiences of being an Iranian immigrant growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of a handful of brown kids in a near all white school district. She examines how the insecurities she is carrying from her past are leading her to parent with fear rather than love. She also questions her identity as both a mother and a pediatrician, given she had no inkling her child is transgender. She examines why her medical training never prepared her for parenting a trans child. As her daughter transitions from male to female, she discovers her own capacity to evolve, what it really means to parent, and how to use her voice to raise awareness about the large percentage of transgender people who don't present in childhood in the classical way the media portrays. While this is a story that weaves the journeys of a pediatrician mother and her transgender teenager, it illustrates universal themes of parenting, identity, belonging, self-discovery, growth, and unconditional love. It is the story of a modern American family. (@pariahassouri) and my instagram(@laparia).

Born on and raised outside an Army base in Seoul, South Korea, Christina Strain moved to the US at 18 to attended Louisiana State University, where she received a BFA in Graphic Design. After, she went on to color comics for Marvel comics for 10 years, and during her last few years at Marvel, she started writing her own webcomics. Shortly after attending several UCLA extension classes (for screenwriting) Christina retired from coloring comics to pursue her masters degree in screenwriting at The American Film Institute. Since, she's write and produce on TV shows like THE MAGICIANS and SHADOW AND BONE and written the Netflix film FINDING 'OHANA. “Finding ‘Ohana” begins with two New York kids, tomboy skateboarder Pili (Pee-Lee) and her dopey big brother Ioane (EE-oh-AHN-nay), traveling with their mom Leilani (Kelly Hu) to visit their grandfather Kimo (Branscombe Richmond) in Hawaii. When Pili, an avid geocacher back in New York, finds a secret journal promising hidden treasure, she sets out on an adventure that takes her deep into the heart of sacred volcanic caves. She's joined by her new friend Casper (Owen Vaccaro), a white kid who grew up in Hawaii. Ioane is loathe to chase after her, but the prospect becomes intriguing when he's joined by crush-worthy local Hana (Lindsay Watson). https://twitter.com/christinastrain

Julie Wong spent more than a decade writing speeches and developing press conferences while serving as Deputy Mayor to Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn and leading communications for Senator Barbara Boxer and then-L.A. City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, among others. She also served in multiple executive roles for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts where she was involved with major initiatives including the opening of Shanghai Disneyland and the announcement of Star Wars lands coming to Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Along the way, she realized she had her own stories to tell, too. Julie is currently a Co-Producer on Season 17 of Grey's Anatomy. She participated in the CAPE New Writers Fellowship and the CBS Writers Mentoring Program, and holds a degree in government from Claremont McKenna College and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University. Grey's Anatomy, Episode 1704: You'll Never Walk Alone While hospitalized with Covid, Meredith dreams of seeing her friend George O'Malley, who died during their medical residency. Meanwhile, Owen's misdiagnosis of a patient challenges more than he imagined, an asymptomatic Koracick begins to go stir-crazy at home, and Maggie gets a not-so-subtle glimpse into Winston's background.

Elle Johnson is a TV writer. Her credits include Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Ghost Whisperer, and The Fosters. One of Elle's career highlights came on The Glades where she wrote and produced an episode set in the world of NASCAR that featured nine actual racecars, four champion drivers, and one monkey. She was co-showrunner on Netflix's Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam CJ Walker which won an NAACP Image award for best limited series. Most recently she was an Executive Producer on the Amazon original series Bosch, based on the Michael Connelly detective novels. Originally from Hollis, Queens Elle graduated from Harvard College, studied writing on a Rotary Scholarship at the University of East Anglia in England, and has taken numerous classes at UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She was a finalist for UCLA's 2015 Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing. The Officer's Daughter is her first book. SYNOPSIS When Elle Johnson was 16 years old, her 16 year-old cousin Karen had her face blown off at point blank range in a robbery at a Burger King in the Bronx. Elle comes from a family of black law enforcement officers. Her uncle, Karen's dad, was a homicide detective. Her father was a parole officer. The aftermath of Karen's murder, the cross-country manhunt spearheaded by the NYPD and the FBI to find the killers, and the subsequent trials and media circus, marked the defining end of Elle's childhood innocence. Thirty years later, living in Los Angeles, writing for various television shows (including several police procedurals), Elle receives an email from Karen's brother notifying her that one of the killers is up for parole. Asked to write a letter encouraging the parole board not to set him free Elle realizes that before she can write a letter condemning a man she's never met, she must also investigate the hard truths of her own past: family who never really spoke of the devastating effect the murder of her young cousin had on any of them, with secrets of their own, and a complicated father she never truly understood. The Officer's Daughter is the story of a family, a terrible tragedy, and the power--and ultimately the freedom--of forgiveness.

Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Low Desert, Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize, Gangster Nation, The House of Secrets, which he co-authored with Brad Meltzer, and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the co-host of the wildly popular podcast Literary Disco, named a top literary podcast by the Washington Post. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside where he founded and directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts. With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, the spare, stylish stories in The Low Desert assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar. Raymond Carver meets Elmore Leonard in this extraordinary collection of contemporary crime writing set in the critically acclaimed Gangsterland universe, a series called "gloriously original" by The New York Times Book Review.

Multiple Emmy nominee Melissa Rosenberg is Series Creator and Showrunner of Marvel's Jessica Jones. The show garnered tremendous response and critical acclaim, including winning the prestigious Peabody Award for its genre-bending approach. As one of Hollywood's most versatile, sought-after storytellers, Rosenberg is currently in an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV to develop new projects. Her company, Tall Girls Productions, focuses on developing and producing film and TV series with an emphasis on interesting, complex roles for women in front of and behind the camera. On the film side, Rosenberg's credits include all five screenplays for the vampire romance phenomenon, The Twilight Saga, which grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. She also wrote the hit dance film Step Up, which launched a multi-film franchise. Additional television credits in Rosenberg's diverse range include four seasons as both head writer and Executive Producer of the Showtime original series Dexter, which earned multiple nominations and awards, including the Peabody Award.

Brian Shin has been a professional poker player, a journalist covering high school football and writing for Koream, and a participant of the ABC-Disney Writing Program, Sundance Episodic Lab, and CBS Diversity Showcase. Brian is a story editor on the ABC drama The Good Doctor.

Michael Werwie is the screenwriter of the Academy Nicholl Fellowship-winning Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile. He is currently developing an original series for television and has written projects for Warner Bros., Legendary, Fox, and Amazon. Michael is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is a graduate of USC.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Cindy Lin is a former journalist with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. She's written and produced many multimedia news features for children, one of which received a Peabody Award. She is the author of The Twelve and its sequel, Treasures of the Twelve.

Aatif Rashid is the author of the literary comedy Portrait of Sebastian Khan, which explores the complicated romantic life of a Muslim American art history student. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Massachusetts Review, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Kenyon Review blog.

Wally Rudolph is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of the novels Four Corners and Mighty, Mighty. Born in Canada to Chinese-Jamaican immigrant parents and raised in Texas, he's traveled and lived throughout North America, but now is more than happy to be living and creating in The City of Angels.