Session A - Friday, March 7

Gerald Locklin, Poet

Gerald Locklin is Professor Emeritus of Literature at CSU Long Beach and a Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. He has published over 125 books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism; the most recent include The Cezanne/Pissarro Poems (World Parade Books), The Ristorante Godot (Bottle of Smoke Press), and Wedlock Sunday and Other Poems (Nerve Cowboy). His writings have appeared in England, Germany, Italy, Canada,
Japan, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere abroad.

Janet Fitch, Novelist

Janet Fitch is the author of the novels Paint It Black, published in 2006, and White Oleander, an Oprah Book Club selection. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Los Angeles Noir, Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Black Warrior Review. She has taught composition and creative writing to 8th graders, and she
currently teaches fiction writing in the MPW program at USC and at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She was the 2001 Mosely Fellow in Creative Writing at Pomona College.

Session B – Friday, March 7

Coleman Hough, Screenwriter and Poet

Coleman Hough wrote the screenplay for Full Frontal directed by Steven Soderbergh. Bubble is her second collaboration with Soderbergh. Between writing Full Frontal and Bubble, she wrote a script for HBO about the life and work of Katharine Graham. Tom Hooper will direct the HBO production in early 2008. Coleman has been a writing fellow at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 1995, '97, '98, ’03, ’04 and ‘05. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and The Asheville Review. She teaches screenwriting at USC in the Professional Writing Program. She is also a core faculty member of the low residency graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont. Most recently she wrote and directed a short film called The Diagnosis, starring Lesley Ann Warren, James Urbaniak, and Emily Deschanel.

Patty Seyburn, Poet

Patty Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster and Diasporadic which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, New England Review, Field, Slate, Crazyhorse, Cutbank, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast and Western Humanities Review. Seyburn grew up in Detroit, earned a BS and MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.

Session D – Saturday, March 8

Frank Gaspar, Poet and Novelist

Frank X. Gaspar is Professor of English at Long Beach City College and a member of the faculty in the Master of Fine Arts Writing Program at Antioch University. The author of four collections of poetry, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a California Arts Council Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and two inclusions in Best American Poetry. His books have won the Morse Poetry Prize, the Anhinga Poetry Prize, and the Brittingham Prize for Poetry. His novel, Leaving Pico, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Award Winner, A Borders Book of Distinction, and winner of the California Book Award.

Alan Sitomer – YA Novelist

Alan Lawrence Sitomer is a critically acclaimed young adult author as well as an award winning educator, having been named California’s 2007 Teacher of the Year. Mr. Sitomer has authored a trilogy of young adult novels published by Disney which include The Hoopster, Hip- Hop High School and Homeboyz. Additionally, he is the author of Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics, a text being used in classrooms across the United States to engage disengaged students in both poetry and school. Furthermore, Mr. Alan (as his students like to call him) is an innercity high school English teacher, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola Marymount University and a nationally renowned speaker specializing in engaging reluctant readers.

Session E – Saturday, March 9

Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist, reading with
Reyna Grande, Novelist

Sonia Nazario, projects reporter for The Los Angeles Times and author of Enrique’s Journey, has spent more than two decades reporting social issues and earning dozens of awards. The newspaper series, upon which Enrique’s Journey is based, won more than a dozen awards including the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and the George Polk Award for International Reporting. In 1998, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on drug-addicted parents, and in 1994, she won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series about hunger among schoolchildren in California. She grew up in Kansas and Argentina, and has written extensively from Latin America and about Latinos in the United States. She is a graduate of Williams College and has a Master’s Degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

Reyna Grande, author of Across a Hundred Mountains, was born in Guerrero, Mexico, in 1975. Her parents emigrated to the United States and left Reyna and her siblings in the care of her grandmother. At the age of nine, Reyna entered the United States as an undocumented person to join her parents. She attended Pasadena City College for two years before transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1999, Reyna obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing and Film & Video, thus becoming the first person in her family to graduate from a university. In 2003, Reyna was chosen as one of eight fellows in the PEN USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellowship, where she completed her novel. She is an ESL teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, Adult School division. She lives in Los Angeles with her son and is currently working on translating Across a Hundred Mountains and finishing her second novel.

Session G – Sunday, March 9

Paul Tayyar, Poet

Paul Kareem Tayyar is an Iranian-American poet whose first book of poems, Everyday Magic, was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, San Francisco Serenade, will be released by West-Coast Bias Press in the spring of 2008. He is also the founding editor of World Parade Books, an independent press which will be releasing books by Gerald Locklin and Lyn Lifshin in early 2008.

Paula Brancato, Poet, Playwright

Paula Brancato was one of the first women executives on Wall Street, a music producer in Hollywood and a strategic planner for The World Bank, all of which have contributed to her unique voice. A poet, playwright and filmmaker, Brancato’s awards include National Screenwriters, Organization of Black Screenwriters, WINFEMME, Chesterfield H. Jones Foundation, Poetry Guild, Faulkner, Asheville Writers Workshop, Pacific Northwest Writers, Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Czech Republic), Houston Remi and Angelciti Film Festival awards. She has twice been a Sundance finalist. Brancato has also been published in GSU Review, Georgetown Review, Natchez Anthology, The Writers Place Anthology, Litchfield Review, Rattle Magazine, Cycle Life Poetry, Southern California Anthology, Disconnections, and Lilly Press. She is a current nominee for Best of the Internet 2007 and a commissioned writer for artist Michael David’s Greenhouse Project.