Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist based in Watsonville and San Francisco. His fiction, essays, and drawings have appeared in diverse publications that include "Kindergarde: Experimental Writing For Children" (edited by Dana Teen Lomax for Black Radish Press), "No Straight Lines," a 40-year compendium of LGBT comics (edited by Justin Hall for Fantagraphics Press), "Street Art San Francisco" (edited 2009 by Annice Jacoby for Abrams Press), and "Infinite Cities," an experimental atlas of San Francisco (edited by Rebecca Solnit for UC Berkeley Press). He has exhibited his visual art in galleries across the Bay Area.

Cortez often combines humor and tragedy to tell stories of resilient survivors who exist on the margins of the economy, the law, and social acceptability. "Gordo" is Jaime's debut collection of short stories. Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Press, is the publisher of the book.

He lived in San Francisco and Oakland for 22 years, and spent five years serving as the program manager at Galeria de la Raza. Cortez received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his fine art MFA at UC Berkeley.

Photo credit: Mark Smotroff

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse). He lives in Berkeley, CA.

His debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies — the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.

Susanna Kwan is the author of Awake in the Floating City, which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize. She lives in San Francisco and teaches writing with The Dream Side.

Of Awake in the Floating City, The Washington Post says, “The book asks haunting questions about the ability of art to contain or transmit memory. The results are also indicative of a turn away from solution-oriented speculative fiction toward a different kind of warning—of how we might live with an end that is already in progress. The question is still open for a dwindling time, of whether the rot is already in our bones or if we have the chance, maybe the will, to stop it. Awake in the Floating City doesn’t offer resignation, exactly, but a preemptive mourning, as if to call attention to what we are in danger of losing by showing it in the process of being irrevocably lost.”

Photo credit: Andria Lo

Lisa Teasley is the author of the acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, and the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, published by Bloomsbury. Her most recent is the story collection Fluid published by Cune Press. Lisa is the librettist of the coming 2026 world premiere Long Beach Opera The Passion of Nell as well as the writer/presenter of the BBC television documentary “High School Prom.” Her essays, stories and poems have been much anthologized, including in WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America and Europa Editions’ The Passenger California.  Her writings have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, Chinese and Arabic. Lisa was the senior fiction editor for Los Angeles Review of Books and has taught in numerous MFA writing programs including Cal Arts and UC Riverside, as well as having taught master writing classes around the world in countries such as Nigeria, Indonesia and China. As a much-exhibited visual artist, her coming solo show is February-March 2026 at the Offus gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Lisa lives in Mendocino County.

Photo credit: Irwin Miller

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory, winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.

Photo credit: Christopher Michel