Los Altos High School

Sulome Anderson is a journalist based between New York and Beirut, Lebanon. She has written and produced for outlets including The Atlantic, New York magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, NBC News and Newsweek. Her book The Hostage's Daughter was published by HarperCollins in 2016. 

 

Charlie Jane Anders' latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She's also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award, and her story "Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

 

Traci Chee is a best-selling and award-winning author of books for young people, including the instant New York Times best seller and Kirkus Prize Finalist The Reader and Printz Honor Book, Walter Award Honoree, and National Book Award Finalist We Are Not Free. Her forthcoming title is A Thousand Steps into Night, a Japanese-inspired young adult fantasy. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys hiking, egg painting, bonsai gardening, and hosting game nights for family and friends. She lives in California with her fast dog.

 

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

Melissa Cistaro is the author of the award-winning memoir Pieces of My Mother (US edition) and the Canadian bestseller Without My Mother (HarperCollins Canada). Her stories, essays and interviews have appeared in The New Ohio Review, Brevity, The Huffington Post, PBS: To the Contrary, Good Housekeeping and the anthologies Love and Profanity and Cherished. Melissa mentors writers and teaches memoir writing workshops in the Bay Area and beyond. She’s taught on faculty at The San Miguel Writers’Conference, Writing Pad SF, Book Passage, San Francisco Writers’ Conference and Word Wave Literary Festival in Tahoe. She lives in San Rafael, California with her family - and lots of books.

 

Kate Crane has written and edited for Dow Jones, Men’s Journal, Radar, Inc., Hearst publications, and Brooklyn Rail. She covered music regularly for Time Out New York for about a decade. At SmartMoney: The Wall Street Journal Magazine, she was deputy managing editor, and moved to Silicon Valley in 2015 to be deputy editor of news and culture site OZY.com.

Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane (Hanover Square Press), a memoir about her father's 1987 murder and the years she spent trying to understand it, will be published in 2021.

Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of PICTURE US IN THE LIGHT, which was a winner of the California Book Award and an LA Times Book Prize finalist, and CONVICTION, which was a finalist for the Morris Award. Her next book, WHEN WE WERE INFINITE, is forthcoming in March.

 

Abigail Hing Wen is the New York Times best selling author of “Loveboat, Taipei,” a young adult Crazy Rich Asians meets a Jane Austen Comedy of Manners, inspired by the actual cultural exchange program in Taipei attended by many Asian American teens since the 1960s. The romp is woven through with an immigrant girl’s coming-of-age story, of navigating family complexities, discovering identity in all its facets and finding love.

 

Loveboat, Taipei is a Barnes and Noble Young Adult Book Club and, along with Abigail, has been featured in print and television in Entertainment Weekly, Bloomberg and The World Journal. Loveboat, Taipei has been optioned for film by the producers of To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and Abigail will be executive producing with the team.

 

Abigail Hing Wen holds a BA from Harvard, JD from Columbia Law School and MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Like Ever, she is obsessed with musicals. When she’s not writing stories or listening to her favorite scores, she is busy working in venture capital and artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Loveboat, Taipei is her first novel.

Vanessa Hua is an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the national bestseller, A River of Stars, and Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Panama, and Ecuador, and her work appeared publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.  The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Writers Grotto, and elsewhere. Find her at www.vanessahua.com

 

Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. The Atlas of Reds and Blues—winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize—is her first novel. It was selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a book “All Georgians Should Read,” long-listed for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature, and long-listed for the Golden Poppy Award presented by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. The Atlas of Reds and Blues was named by The Washington Post as one of the best books of 2019, and has garnered praise in Time magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and elsewhere. A former newspaper reporter, Laskar is now a poet, photographer, essayist, and novelist.

 

Stacey Lee is an award-winning author of historical and contemporary young adult fiction. A native of southern California and fourth-generation Chinese American, she graduated from UCLA then got her law degree at UC Davis King Hall.  After practicing law in Silicon Valley for several years, she finally took up the pen because she wanted the perks of being able to nap during the day, and it was easier than moving to Spain.

 

Shefali Luthra covers women and health care for The 19th, an Austin-based nonprofit newsroom focused on the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Previously, she was a correspondent for Kaiser Health News, where she spent six years covering health policy on the national and state levels. Luthra’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and The Guardian.

Zoe Morgan is a 2014 Los Altos High School graduate who currently works as the education reporter at the Los Altos Town Crier newspaper. She covers local school districts, including MVLA, and writes articles on issues ranging from the debate over facilities for Bullis Charter School to feature pieces about school clubs and extracurricular activities. 

 

For as long as she can remember, Zoe has loved immersing herself in the minutiae of school budgets and policy decisions, and translating those details into compelling stories. As a student at Los Altos High School, Zoe was the news editor and then editor-in-chief of The Talon and spent much of her time attending school board meetings and asking school administrators a seemingly endless stream of questions.

 

From LAHS, Zoe attended American University in Washington, DC, where she received a dual degree in journalism and public affairs, with a minor in data science. She then spent a year covering education in rural Oregon at the Grants Pass Daily Courier, becoming coming back home to work at the Los Altos Town Crier.

Parker Peevyhouse loves In-N-Out fries, redwood trees, and movies about sentient robots. She is the author of the science fiction puzzle-thrillers Strange Exit (Tor Teen 2020) and The Echo Room (Tor Teen 2018), which have been called “compulsively readable” and "thrilling" in starred reviews. Her collection of novellas, Where Futures End (Penguin 2016) was named a Best Book For Teens by the New York Public Library, the Chicago Public Library, and Bank Street. Parker lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works in education.

Ken Pontac has been a Migrant Film Worker in the animation industry for over a quarter of a century, writing and directing content for television, film, and various new-fangled thinking machines. In the past several years Pontac has written scripts and dialog for the Marvel Universe MMO, Sonic the Hedgehog’s “Lost World” game for Sega, a new animated series featuring the ghost gobbling Pac-Man, Disney’s animated action/adventure series Slugterra, an upcoming revival of the classic “Thunderbirds Are Go!” series, the charming pre-school show Octonauts, and the less-than-charming Internet sensation Happy Tree Friends (a show so violent that it's banned in Russia). He is also still receiving royalty checks for writing the LazyTown song "You Are A Pirate," which has become an Internet meme, enjoying millions of hits on YouTube and inspiring multiple mash-ups and drunken karaoke videos. Pontac lives in Sausalito with a beautiful redheaded nurse and his two crazy canines, Whistle the Wonder Dog and Little Mickey Blue Eyes.

Anne Raeff’s second novel, Winter Kept Us Warm, published in 2018, won the silver medal for the California Book Award for Fiction. Her short story

collection, The Jungle Around Us won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the California Book Award and was on The San Francisco Chronicle’s 100 Best Books of 2017 list. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Simpson Literary Award. Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia, also a novel, was published in 2002. Raeff’s stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica among other places. Her next novel, Only the River, will be published in May 2020. She is proud to be a high school teacher and lives in San Francisco.

 

Yasmeen Serhan is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers a wide range of topics, including populism, nationalism, and global protest movements. Since joining the magazine's London bureau in 2017, she has also reported on Brexit, European politics, and transatlantic affairs. She was previously an assistant editor and editorial fellow with The Atlantic in Washington, D.C. Even more previously, she studied international relations and French at the University of Southern California, where she could often be found writing and editing stories for the university's student-run newspaper, the Daily Trojan. She graduated from Los Altos High School in 2012.

 

Jenn Alandy Trahan is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford and was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction. She was born in Houston, Texas and raised in Vallejo, California. Jenn received her BA in English from UC Irvine and her MFA & MA from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine. She is at work on her first book.    

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is author of the novel WINTER COUNTS (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020), nominated for the 2021 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.  WINTER COUNTS, an IndieBound and Amazon bestseller, is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Amazon, Sun Sentinel,  LitReactor, CrimeReads, Deadly Pleasures, Air Mail, MysteryPeople, and BOLO Books.  The book was also selected as an Amazon Best Mystery and Thriller of the year, an Indie Next pick, Best Noir Fiction and Best Debut of the Year as well as a Notable Selection for Best Crime Novel by CrimeReads.  The novel was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, Best of the Month by Apple Books, and was the November choice of the BuzzFeed Book Club and the AWP Virtual Book Club

Norman Zelaya has published stories in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Fourteen Hills and NY Tyrant. His work is reflective of his experiences growing up in the Mission during the 80s. He is currently a Special Education teacher