Please join us on Saturday, April 6th, from 6-7 for a reading from Writing the Golden State: Exploring the New Literary Terrain, featuring co-editors Romeo Guzman and Carribean Fragoza, joined by Eaton fire survivors and book contributors Myriam Gurba, Carolyn Dunn, and Wendy Cheng.
Proceeds from book sales of Writing the Golden State will go to Octavia's Bookshelf, as they mobilized early to sustain survivors and became a community hub of strength, solidarity, and support from the early days of the fire and into the recovery phase.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine ranked her true-crime memoir Mean as one of the “Best LGBTQ Books of All Time.” Her recent essay collection Creep: Accusations and Confessions was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review. Her next book, Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings, will be published by Timber Press in October 2025.
Carolyn M. Dunn, MFA, PhD., is an Indigenous artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole Freedman descent on her father’s side, and is French Creole (French-Canadian, African, Tunica/Choctaw/Biloxi/Ishak) on her mother’s. Her life as a storyteller encompasses both poetry and playwriting with works about family, grief, resilience, and the landscape in all genres and in between. In addition to the award-winning Outfoxing Coyote (That Painted Horse Press, 2002), her books include Through the Eye of the Deer (with Carol Zitzer-Comfort, Aunt Lute Books, 1999), Coyote Speaks (with Ari Berk, HN Abrams, 2008) Echolocation: Poems, Stories and Songs from Indian Country: L.A. (Fezziweg Press, 2013), The Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck (Mongrel Empire Press, 2017), two forthcoming titles, The Frybread Queen, Soledad, and Three Sisters: Three Plays by Carolyn Dunn (No Passport Press, 2022) and Decentered Playwriting, coedited with Leslie Hunter and Eric Micah Holmes, Routledge, 2023). and more. Her plays The Frybread Queen, Ghost Dance, and Soledad have been developed and staged at Native Voices at the Autry, and her current work in progress is the pow wow comedy entitled Chasing Tailfeathers. Stage acting credits include The Bingo Palace, Citizen, Desert Stories for Lost Girls, Neechie-itas, Sliver of a Full Moon, and the musicals Distant Thunder and Missing Peace. She lives part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in Oklahoma with her family.
Carribean Fragoza is a fiction and nonfiction writer from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited books include East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte and Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, Tropics of Meta, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. From 2023-2024, she co-directed C.A.S.A. Zamora in Zamora Park, in El Monte. She is a 2023 Whiting Literary Award recipient and Creative Writing faculty at California Institute of the Arts.
Wendy Cheng is a writer and professor living in Pasadena. She is the author of The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California and Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism, and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in Boom: A Journal of California, the Cincinnati Review, and Zócalo Public Square, among other publications, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction essays about plant migration and immigrant relationships to land between Northeast Asia and the US.