“I’m always trying to merge things, rather than balance them. I want to create new things that are mixtures of genres or categories I’ve been told are incompatible. I hate separations and borders—I’m always trying to break them down. This has a lot to do with race, of course, with being a person of mixed race, and a person of two different cultures. In my position, you have to believe that boundaries can be broken…
“Machado’s work doesn’t just have form, it takes form. Hers is a greedy oeuvre… in [her] stories, form is uncanny, sly, a pool of raindrops, a slightly skewed face in the mirror. We’ve seen it all before, but never quite like this.” --“Double Take: On Carmen Maria Machado” by Sofia Samatar in Los Angeles Review of Books “Carmen Maria Machado’s stories build and build until they surround and ensnare, and at the end…
Who she is “A midwesterner at heart,” Lisa Mecham lives in Los Angeles and is working on a novel. Her poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Juked, and Barrelhouse Online, among other publications. Honors include a nomination for the James Kirkwood Award through the UCLA Extension Writing Program and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize for her piece "A Long Walk Through Belmont" in Digital Americana.
“Writing, to me, is an act of anti-erasure. It reaches for the unsayable. Anti-erasure is when the silenced or marginalized object speaks. When it asks a reader to listen to what it has to say. And what it says is the evidence.” --NPM Daily “I write about my experiences because I’m uneasy with the silence. I’m uneasy with the abject and unfathomable horror surrounding the topic—as if sexual molestation is not something that happens…
“I write to shred the cloak of invisibility thrust upon us.” - The Invisible Latina “A mystery is the only place on this Earth where we really find justice” - an interview with Wendy Werris at Publishers Weekly Who she is Désirée Zamorano lives in L.A., where she writes award-winning short fiction, plays, and novels. Zamorano brings her passion for engaging elementary and middle school students in enriching language arts expression and experiences to Occidental's…
An Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst, Sullivan holds her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University. This “proud native of Harlem, NY” has won so many awards, fellowships and residencies that we gave up on listing them all here.
