Los Altos High School

Jenn Alandy Trahan earned her BA from the University of California, Irvine, and her MA and MFA from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction brought Jenn to Stanford University, where she continues to teach as a Jones Lecturer. Jenn’s work has also been supported by the Community of Writers, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, Plympton and The Writer’s Block Downtown fellowships in Las Vegas, Nevada, The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence Program in Lenox, Massachusetts, Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency in Montegiovi, Italy, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, and Write On, Door County, in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Her fiction can be found in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. 

Read Jenn’s work here 

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.

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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 Nana Brew Hammond.

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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 former physics teacher at Saratoga High School, live in Los Gatos in a house where three children and their dog once grew.

Read Alison's work here

Alan Chazaro is the author of These Spaceships Weren't Built For Us (Tia Chucha Press, 2026), Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and was selected as a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His work can be found in NPR, The Guardian, SLAM, GQ, L.A. Times, and more. He is currently based in Veracruz, Mexico. (LAHS c/o 2005)

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Marisa Churchill spent a decade of her career working in some of San Francisco's most notable restaurants (The Slanted Door, Rubicon, LuLu). She was called “one of the city’s top pastry chefs,” by Michael Bauer, former head food critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a competitor on Top Chef season two, and competed multiple times on Food Network Challenge, where she took first or second place in every challenge. She is the author of two cookbooks Sweet & Skinny and My Sweet & Skinny Life. Her recipes have appeared in numerous culinary publications, from Food & Wine to Epicurious. Her recipes have also been featured in Oprah.com, Women's Health, and on numerous TV shows: The Talk, Access Hollywood, Hallmark's Home & Family, and more. Marisa currently writes for Eater and does recipe development for Delish. She’s a member of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators). When she isn’t cooking, she’s usually busy whipping up fun new plots.

To learn more visit her website or Instagram page.

Read Marisa’s work here

Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.

Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.

Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.

His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.

Read Pranav’s work here

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 Amanda Glaze | Explore Books & Events
• Read Amanda's work here 

LAHS Alumna!

Maria Guardado has covered the San Francisco Giants for MLB.com since 2019. Before moving back home to the Bay Area to join the Giants beat, Maria covered the New York Mets for the Newark Star-Ledger (2016) and the Los Angeles Angels for MLB.com (2017-18). She previously interned at Sports Illustrated and the Huffington Post and has a degree in history from Yale.

Read Maria’s work here

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.

• For more information: Abigail Hing Wen
• Follow IG/Twi/Tiktok: @abigailhingwen
• Read Abigail's work here

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 earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, has published articles, essays, short fiction, and the occasional poem, and teaches writers of all ages. A former suicide crisis line counselor, she's a mental health advocate and speaks to teens about writing and suicide prevention at the same time. When not reading or writing, Ann hikes, swims, sails, or binge-watches TV series. She and her family divide their time between San Francisco, CA, and Chappaquiddick, MA.

Read Ann’s work here

Nikki Kashani is a first-generation Iranian American writer born and raised in Los Altos, California. She earned her B.F.A. in Film and Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in 2017, where she discovered her passion for screenwriting. After graduating, Nikki worked her way up through the television industry as support staff on multiple series across HBO, Amazon, and more. In 2023, she was selected as one of 12 writers for the Disney Writing Program and was soon after hired as a staff writer on Hulu’s Deli Boys, where she wrote for two seasons. Nikki looks forward to continuing to build her body of work and is thrilled to return to her alma mater for Writers Week.
 
Deli Boys trailer here (some violent content)
 
LAHS Alumna!

Imran J. Khan is a Pakistani-American filmmaker, editor, and writer. He made headlines this year with his groundbreaking feature film, “Mustache,” winning the 2023 SXSW Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature.

Imran’s unique journey, storytelling style, and ability to explore complex themes with depth and nuance have solidified his reputation as a visionary director in the South Asian American film industry.

Imran J. Khan IMDB page

Jane Kuo is an Asian American writer who grew up in Los Angeles. Her books, In the Beautiful Country and Land of Broken Promises, are fictional stories inspired by the weekends and summers she spent working in her family’s fast food restaurant. Jane’s essays have appeared in the LA Times and Writer’s Digest. She is currently writing a memoir.
 
Read Jane's work here 

Devi S. Laskar is an award-winning writer and poet, as well as a visual artist, photographer, songwriter, and former newspaper reporter.
 

Her debut novel The Atlas of Reds and Blues explored the intersection of social racism, misogyny, and police violence, and won multiple awards including the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. The Washington Post named it one of the 50 Best Books of 2019.

Her second novel, Circa, a story of friendship and immigration, was a GOOP Book Club pick. Her third novel, Midnight, at the War, about truth and the news before and after 9/11, will be published by Mariner Books in April 2026.
 

Laskar has published two poetry chapbooks, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her full-length poetry collection Self-Portraits Ex Machina will be released by Finishing Line Press in November 2025.
 

She holds degrees from Columbia University, the University of Illinois, and the University of North Carolina. A former journalist, she covered crime, government, and general news for newspapers across several states including NC, IL, HI, GA and FL. Her essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and USA Today. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA/Voices and is completing a spoken-word album.

Read Devi’s work here

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.

• Listen to Katharine's work here

Sena Moon, from Seoul, South Korea, is a 2024-2026 Stegner Fellow and a finalist for The Masters Review’s 2025 Best Emerging Writers Contest and the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and Guernica, among others.

Read Sena’s work here

Christine Moore grew up in rural Northern California surrounded by nature. Her childhood was spent primarily outdoors, where she learned the joy and fragility of life. Her work has appeared in journals such as Erbacce; The Pasadena Review; 26: C A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; Ink, Sweat & Tears; Pinhole Poetry; and The Inflectionist Review. Her chapbook, Lent Words, was published in 2024. Never a Name Given, a collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. She is a journalist, a Poet-Teacher through California Poets in the Schools, and the poet-in-residence at St. Simon Parish in Los Altos.

Read Christine's work here and interview here

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 Ritu'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.

Read Karen's work here

LAHS Alumna!

Sharon Noguchi began her journalism career writing for student newspapers in middle school and high school. After exploring a half-dozen majors in college, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in journalism and minor in Asian studies. Sharon worked many years as a Mercury News editor and reporter, and later as a story editor at Chalkbeat, a non-profit news network covering education.  She also worked as a writer and editor at newspapers in Japan, reported from Cambodia after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge, and spent a year in Japan on a Fulbright fellowship writing about Latin American and Southeast Asian migrant laborers. She enjoys cooking, aspires to master tai chi and eats chocolate only when on deadline.

Read Sharon’s work here

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.
Read Keely's work here

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.

Watch Ken's work here

Shobha Rao is the author of An Unrestored Woman, a short story collection, and the novels Girls Burn Brighter and Indian Country. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and was a Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Girls Burn Brighter has been translated into fifteen languages, and was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Goodreads Choice Awards. She lives in San Francisco.

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Kate Schatz is a feminist author, educator, and public speaker. She's the New York Times-bestselling author of the "Rad Women" book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33 ⅓ book Rid of Me: A Story; and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with “United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife, three children, and pets.

Read Kate’s work here

Yasmeen Serhan is an American-British journalist with a decade of experience reporting for some of the world's most trusted news organizations. 

She is currently the digital features editor at Reuters, where she oversees a portfolio of recurring series spanning global news and culture, AI, sports, and personal finance. 

Before joining Reuters in January 2025, Yasmeen covered foreign affairs for leading American magazines. As a correspondent for Time, she wrote cover stories, profiles, and deeply reported analysis from the magazine's London bureau. Her work included the first major foreign media interviews with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, as well as a profile of Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O'Neil. 

Previously, she was a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covered global affairs with a focus on the rise of populism and nationalism. Based in London, she helped launch the magazine's UK bureau in 2017 after starting out as an editorial fellow on its Washington, D.C. news desk. 

A California native, Yasmeen studied international relations at USC, where she also served as a managing editor of the Daily Trojan, the university's student newspaper of record. She graduated in 2016.

Read Yasmeen’s work here

LAHS Alumna!

Betty Shamieh (she/her) is the author of sixteen plays. Shamieh's debut novel, Too Soon, was published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on January 28, 2025. It has been named PEOPLE Magazine's BOOK OF THE WEEK, the "must-read book of 2025" by the SF CHRONICLE, and a "great book to start of a great year" in OPRAH DAILY. Too Soon was featured as NPR's BOOK OF THE DAY. and ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. It was selected for the February 2025 INDIE NEXT LIST and Book Passage's SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK CLUB.. A profile of Shamieh's work was published in The Atlantic.

Read Betty’s work here

Danna Staaf is a science communicator and marine biologist who earned a PhD from Stanford University with her studies of baby squid. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Science, and Nautilus, and she is the author of Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods (named one of Science Friday's best science books of the year), The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology (a best book of the year of the School Library Journal and the Children's Book Committee), and Nursery Earth: The Wondrous Lives of Baby Animals and the Extraordinary Ways They Shape Our World (hailed as "a gobsmacking delight!"). Her newest book is The Lives of Octopuses and their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods. Staaf lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, children, cat, and innumerable plush octopuses.

Read Danna's work here

Misa Sugiura’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. She is the author of the Asian Pacific American Librarians’ Association’s Award winning novel, It’s Not Like It’s A Secret, as well as the highly acclaimed This Time Will Be Different and Love & Other Natural Disasters. Her short story, “Where I’m From” appears in Come On In, a young adult anthology of stories about immigration, and her popular middle-grade Momo Arashima fantasy series has been praised as “a hilarious, emotion-packed adventure” (Booklist, starred review). You can find her online at her website and Instagram page.

Read Misa’s work here

Gideon Yago (he/him) is a writer and producer. His career began as a reporter and his documentary programming won him Emmys, Peabodys, and an Edward R. Murrow award. He has written for series on HBO, Netflix, Apple+, ABC and WGN America. He has sold pilots to AMC, ABC, Showtime and Hulu. He is currently writing a film about NYC real estate dynasties for A24. He lives with his wife and two children in Pasadena, CA.

Read Gideon’s work here (some profanity and violent content)

Norman Antonio Zelaya is the author of two collections of short fiction, Orlando & Other Stories (Pochino Press, 2017), and Gente/Folks (Black Freighter Press, 2022). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Apogee Journal, NY Tyrant, 14 Hills, Cipactli, and was a finalist for the Zoetrope: All-Story fiction contest in 2015. Also, he curates and hosts the Lunada Literary Lounge at Galería de la raza. His new book, All My Cholo Saints, is forthcoming from El Martillo Press. Norman lives and writes in the Mission District, San Francisco.

Read Norman’s work here