Los Altos High School

 

Sumbul Ali-Karamali is a corporate lawyer, award-winning author, and popular speaker whose books, articles, blogs, and speaking events are her way of promoting intercultural understanding in the world. Sumbul grew up in Southern California, answering questions about Islam and Muslims. With her degree in English (from Stanford University), her law degree (from the University of California at Davis), and her additional law degree in Islamic law (from SOAS at the University of London), she started writing books to answer the very questions she’d been asked her whole life, in a way that was engaging and personal and (she hopes) fun to read. When not writing, Sumbul has been a fiction and nonfiction judge for writing competitions, a board member of nonprofits dedicated to intercultural understanding, and a member of both the steering committee of Women in Islamic Spirituality and Equality (WISE) and the Muslim Women’s Global Shura Council, both of which aim to promote women’s rights and human rights from an Islamic perspective. When she’s not doing any of that, she practices law, listens to opera, never leaves home without a book, and watches Star Trek with her family.

 

Kemi Ashing-Giwa is a writer and grad student based in Palo Alto. She is the author of The Splinter in the Sky, This World Is Not Yours, The King Must Die, and several short stories. Her work won the Compton Crook Award, has been nominated for an Ignyte Award, and has appeared on the USA Today Bestseller List. She studied integrative biology and astrophysics at Harvard, and is now pursuing a PhD in Earth & Planetary Sciences at Stanford.

Alison (Al) Carpenter Davis is a writer, editor, and disability advocate drawn to hidden stories, the power of words to connect, and the commonality in being human. Her essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, the HuffPost, Stanford Magazine, and the International Herald Tribune, among others. Al’s book Letters Home from Stanford came out in 2017, and looks at the heritage, history, and shared experience of college students everywhere. Formerly an editor at Outside magazine and an adjunct professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Al is at work on a memoir about her 50-plus-year journey with Crohn’s disease. During the pandemic, she co-founded the Disability at Stanford Oral History Project to record Stanford’s cross-generational history of disability advocacy and the lived experience of those in the Stanford community with disabilities. For her work on this project, she was awarded the 2024 Susan W. Schofield Oral History Award. Al and her husband, a teacher at Saratoga High School, live in Los Gatos in a house where three children and their dog once grew.

Yangsze Choo is the NYTimes bestselling author of THE GHOST BRIDE (a CILIP Carnegie nominee, Oprah.com's best book of the week, and now a Netflix Original series which was just released Jan 23) and THE NIGHT TIGER, (Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick, Amazon's Spotlight Pick, and a Book of the Month Club selection, as well as one of the best books of the year for Amazon, The Washington Review of Books, Bookpage, Chicago Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, Parade, Real Simple, and Self Magazine). After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a management consultant while writing fiction on a coffee table at home in her spare time. Originally from Malaysia, she spent part of her childhood in Germany and Japan, and now lives in California with her family and several chickens. Yangsze loves to eat and read, and often does both at the same time. Neither of her books would have been possible without large quantities of dark chocolate.

 

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of four books: the children’s picture book Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, the young adult novel Powder Necklace, the anthology of African and Diaspora voices Relations, and her newest novel for adult readers My Parents' Marriage. Also a poet, Brew-Hammond was commissioned to pen and perform an original poem to promote Brooklyn Museum's 2023 "Africa Fashion" exhibit. Every month, she co-leads a writing fellowship whose mission is to write light into the darkness. Learn more at nanabrewhammond.com.

 

Dave Eggers is the author of many books, among them The Eyes and the Impossible, The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, Heroes of the Frontier, A Hologram for the King, and What Is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired over 70 similar organizations worldwide. Eggers is winner of the American Book Award, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the 2024 John Newbery Medalist, for the most distinguished contribution to children's literature for The Eyes and the Impossible. Eggers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

See Dave Eggers’scomplete bibliography.

Amanda Glaze is a bestselling author of young adult novels and an Emmy-award winning film & television producer. Her debut novel, The Second Death of Edie and Violet Bond was a Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Pick and a Rise Feminist Book List Selection. Her most recent book, The Lies of Alma Blackwell, is a gothic mystery inspired by the real-life Winchester Mystery House in Northern California. As a film producer, she’s worked on everything from major feature films to documentaries. Some favorites include the Academy Award-nominated film THE BIG SICK, the Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary George Carlin’s American Dream, and the romantic comedy TRAINWRECK starring Amy Schumer and Bill Hader. Amanda studied theater at UCLA and earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives with her husband and their two cat familiars in Los Angeles. Find her online at amandaglaze.com

Abigail Hing Wen is the New York Times Best Selling Author of Loveboat, Taipei and the recently released companion novel, Loveboat Reunion ad Loveboat Forever (forthcoming November 2023). She is executive producer for the Loveboat, Taipei film, starring Ross Butler and Ashley Liao, which wrapped production in Taipei in 2022. Abigail holds a BA from Harvard, a JD from Columbia Law School, and an MFA from the Vermont School of Fine Arts. When she’s not writing stories or listening to her favorite scores, she is busy working in artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, where she lives with her husband and two children.

 

Ann Jacobus is the author of YA novels Romancing the Dark in the City of Light, winner of the Housatonic Book Award for Young Adult Literature, and The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent, a finalist for both the California Book Award and Northern California Book Awards for Young Adult Literature. She teaches writers of all ages and is a former suicide crisis line counselor and a mental health advocate. When not reading or writing, Ann hikes, swims, sails, or binge-watches TV series. She divides her time between San Francisco, CA, and Chappaquiddick, MA, and believes the right stories can save the world.

 

Last year,  Nikki was one of 12 writers selected to participate in the Disney Writing Program out of thousands of applicants. Two months into the program, she was staffed on Hulu's new show, DELI BOYS, where she got to co-write her first episode of television!

Katharine Mieszkowski is a long-time Bay Area journalist, who works for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She has diverse experience in both local and national news across print, online, and audio platforms. Her most recent position was as a senior reporter and producer at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, where she played a key role in acclaimed investigations concerning Amazon, Tesla, and the nation's largest banks. Katharine's reporting has been featured in prominent media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR's All Things Considered, and KQED's The California Report. At UC Berkeley, Katharine works on the California Local News Fellowship program, supporting more than 70 journalists across the state reporting in local communities. 

 

Sena Moon is a writer from Seoul, South Korea and a 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner fellow. She holds an MFA degree from University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program and has received awards from Boulevard, Carve Magazine, Hopwoods, and Glimmer Train. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Fiddlehead, and Catapult's 2020 Best Debut Stories, among others. She's currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. 

Ritu Mukerji is a doctor and mystery novelist based in Marin County, CA. She received a BA in history from Columbia University and a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Her debut novel, Murder by Degrees, was nominated for an Edgar award for Best First Novel and a Macavity award for Best First Mystery. The book received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal, and was an Amazon editors' pick for best mystery. She is currently at work on her next novel.

 

Read Rita's work here

Karen Nelson is the author of The Sunken Town and the co-founder of the nonprofit Writing By Writers. During her long career in nonprofits she has protected open space, funded cancer research, trained people to complete endurance events, and helped writers bring their work into the world. When not organizing writing workshops, she can be found hiking with her dog, reading, traveling, experimenting in the kitchen, and hosting dinner parties. She writes for various publications and is at work on her next novel.

Claire Oshetsky is the author of the novels EVIL GENIUS (February 2026) POOR DEER (January 2024) and CHOUETTE (November 2021).

POOR DEER was named a "Best Book of 2024" by the New Yorker, and is a finalist for California's Golden Poppy Award. The audiobook adaptation of POOR DEER, read by Sophie Amoss, is a finalist for the 2025 Audie Award Audiobook of the Year.

CHOUETTE was longlisted for the 2022 Pen/Faulkner award for fiction and won the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. It was a finalist for the Barbellion Prize, dedicated to the furtherance of disabled voices in literature, and for the 2022 Otherwise Prize, awarded to works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender roles.

Claire's short fiction has been featured in Fiction International, Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran, Alaska Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, and many others.

A former science journalist, Claire has written for Wired, Technology Review, The New York Times, and other periodicals. Claire is four-time recipient of the "Article of the Year" award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Claire also wrote THE BOOK OF DOG BY LARK BENOBI, an apocalyptic romp that was named one of the ten best eco-fiction books of 2018 by Brit & Co.

Claire lives with their family in Santa Cruz, California.

 

Keely Parrack is a young adult novel and picture book author whose titles include, DON’T LET IN THE COLD, and 10 HOURS TO GO. Born and raised in England, she came to America for a two-year adventure. She is still here twenty years later, doing all the things she loves: writing YA novels, picture books, poetry, and motivating kids to be excited about reading and creative writing. She has worked in retail, education, and for her local indie bookstore. When she’s not brainstorming her next books, she loves to read, binge-watch horror movies, run, travel, and take too many photographs. 

 

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, with her husband and son.

 

Parker Peevyhouse is the author of the science fiction puzzle-thrillers Strange Exit (Tor Teen) and The Echo Room (Tor Teen), which have been called “compulsively readable” and "thrilling" in starred reviews. Her speculative novel, Where Futures End (Penguin), was named a Best Book For Teens by the New York Public Library, the Chicago Public Library, and Bank Street.

 

Parker grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she still resides. From a young age, she loved writing strange stories, and at the age of thirteen, she won a national contest in which participants finished a story started by RL Stine, the author of the Goosebumps series. After earning a BA in English, Parker went on to work in education while writing novels. Her hobbies include exploring nature, watching science fiction movies, and solving any kind of puzzle she can get her hands on.

 

Ken Pontac has been an animation pro for over fifty years (how the hell did THAT happen?). His early work includes the stop-motion series Gumby, as well as the various iterations of the classic video game Clayfighter and ten years of writing for the Sonic the Hedgehog games. Pontac wrote and story-edited multiple episodes of the notorious Happy Tree Friends (a show so violent that it's banned in Russia but has still enjoyed over a billion hits worldwide).  Most famous meme? Wrote the Icelandic ear-worm You Are A Pirate. Give it a listen; it’ll lay eggs in your brain, and the eggs will hatch, and all the earworms will dance in your brain.

 

His cult classic stop-motion series Bump in the Night is available in a compilation produced by Mill Creek Entertainment. Pontacʼs work on the delightfully pro-social animated series Arthur may offset some of the karmic debt incurred by his other literary efforts but will probably only bump him up from tapeworm to tree-frog on the reincarnation cycle.

 

Pontac recently completed a documentary, Out From The Ashes, about his (SPOILER ALERT) successful efforts to extricate a Ukrainian family from a Russian filtration camp. 

 

Pontac lives in Sausalito with a beautiful redheaded nurse, a tranquil Xoloitzcuintli named Chalupa, and a not-so-tranquil Xoloitzcuintli named Ziggy Stardust.

 

Allison Saft is the New York Times, Sunday Times, and USA Today bestselling author of A Dark and Drowning Tide, A Fragile Enchantment, and other romantic fantasy novels. After receiving her MA in English Literature from Tulane University, she moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast, where she spends her time practicing aerial silks. She lives with her partner and an Italian greyhound named Marzipan.

 

Read Allison's work here

Yasmeen Serhan is an American-British journalist with a nearly decade of experience covering foreign affairs for some of the world’s most trusted news outlets. She is currently the digital features editor at Reuters, where she helps develop and prototype new formats and features for Reuters.com.

 

Prior to joining Reuters, Yasmeen covered foreign affairs for American magazines—first at The Atlantic, where she covered global affairs from the magazine’s London bureau, which she helped launch in 2017 as a reporter covering Britain and Europe, and then at TIME, where she penned cover stories, profiles, and analysis from the magazine’s London bureau, including the first major foreign media interviews for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf.

 

A California native, Yasmeen studied international relations at the University of Southern, where she served as managing editor of the Daily Trojan.

Maria was born and  grew up near Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and studied Visual Communications at George Washington University in DC. She has a background in brand design and innovation and has illustrated/written 15 picture books for kids. Song of a Blackbird, Maria's historical graphic novel about a female artist in the Amsterdam resistance during WWII, is her first graphic novel.

Maria lives in Alameda with her husband and teenage son.