Episodes
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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. -
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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.
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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. - Show more
