Presenters

English Workshops

• • Shonda Buchanan

    Author of five books, Shonda Buchanan was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a daughter of Mixed Bloods, tri-racial and tri-ethnic African American, American Indian and European-descendant families who migrated from North Carolina and Virginia in the mid-1700 to 1800s to Southwestern Michigan. Black Indian, her memoir, which won the Indie New Generation Book Award for Memoir, begins the saga of these migration stories of Free People of Color communities exploring identity, ethnicity, landscape and loss. Her collection of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, was nominated for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Library of Virginia Book Awards. An award-winning poet and educator, Shonda is a Sundance Writing Arts Fellow, a California Community Foundation Fellow, a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and Literary Editor of Harriet Tubman Press. In addition to her work as a literary activist, a teaching artist and a mentor for young writers, she's taught at Hampton University, William & Mary College (Writer-in-Residence), California State University, Northridge and Mt. San Antonio College. An active board member of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Columnist for the LA Weekly, Shonda received an MFA at Antioch University. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Follow @shondabuchanan or contact Shonda at info@ShondaBuchanan.com or visit www.ShondaBuchanan.com.

  •  Elise Capron

    Elise Capron is an agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, established 40 years ago and based in Del Mar, CA, which is known for guiding the careers of many best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors, including Amy Tan, Lisa See, Maxine Hong Kingston, Eric Foner, and many more. A graduate of Emerson College, Elise holds a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing, and has been with SDLA for 16 years.

    On the fiction side, Elise is interested in character-driven literary fiction for the adult market. She aims to work with writers who are getting their work published regularly in magazines and who have a realistic sense of the market and their audience. Some of her representative fiction clients include Tiphanie Yanique, Howard A. Rodman, and Courtney Brkic. On the non-fiction front, Elise is looking primarily for well-written narrative non-fiction in the areas of cultural studies, science, medicine, and the environment. She is particularly keen to work with journalists and historians. Some of her representative non-fiction clients include Cynthia Barnett, Meera Subramanian, Jonathon Keats, and Jack Shuler.

    You can learn more about Elise and all the agents at SDLA at www.dijkstraagency.com.

  • T. Anders Carson

    T. Anders Carson has had his poems published in 37 countries including translations into French, Greek, Japanese and Swedish. He has written 5 books of poetry. His latest is entitled Unfortunately, Thanks for Everything from Pelekinesis Press. He is a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation

    Fellow. He is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets. He has read his work from Los Angeles to London including stops in Cairo, Paris, Stockholm and Swansea. He worked for Postnord in Copenhagen, Denmark delivering mail and parcels on a bicycle. He is

    a former Municipal Councilor, a Canada Post employee and both a badminton and soccer coach. He currently resides on the outskirts of Portland in Ontario. He lives with his wife and a cat.

  •  Scott Noon Creley

    Scott Noon Creley holds an MFA in poetry from California State University, Long Beach, and a BA from UC Riverside. His work has been featured in the collections Bear Flag Republic, Cadence Collective: Year Two as well as in quality journals as diverse as Sentence, Miramar, Spillways, Pravic and The Carnival Literary Magazine. His most recent book Digging a Hole to the Moon debuted in the top 50 on Amazon.com’s poetry section.

    In 2017 he was one of six featured readers for Beijing Normal University, the Lu Xun Literary Institute, and Yunnan University in Kunming as part of the 8th annual Sino-American ecological poetry festival. He is the founding chairman of San Gabriel Valley Literature Festival inc., a non-profit literacy foundation.  

  •  Brian Cuban 

    Brian Cuban is an attorney, author and mental health awareness and recovery advocate. He is the author of the best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer, Tales of The Bar, Booze Blow & Redemption.

  •  Monica Fernandez

    Monica Fernandez started at Red Hen as a Marketing/Publicity intern in September 2017, and moved into the position of Media Manager in February 2018, overseeing the Media and Publicity for Red Hen and its titles. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine cum laude with a Bachelor’s of Arts in English in 2013, and most recently graduated from City University London with a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing and Publishing in 2016.She has also had several short fiction and creative nonfiction pieces published in places such as The Chaffey Review, Rind Literary Magazine, Scribendi, The Left Coast Review, Creepy Gnome, and Slush Pile Magazine’s Envy anthology.

  •  Mark Givens 

    Mark Givens is the owner of Pelekinesis, a local publishing company; Bamboo Dart Press, a collaboration with Shrimper Records; and the Inland Valley Art & Literature Show, a regional podcast. He is a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the Academy of American Poets, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and the Inlandia Institute.

  •  liz gonzález

    liz gonzález is author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The International Literary Quarterly, and the anthology San Bernardino Singing. She teaches creative writing at the UCLA Extension Writers Program. A fourth generation Southern Californian, she grew up in the San Bernardino Valley and currently lives in Long Beach.

  •  Jeffrey Graessley

    Jeffrey Graessley lives in Long Beach, CA with his lovely wife, poet Sarah Miller, and their three rescues (pittie-mixes). When not walking the dogs and aggressively asking strangers 'who rescued who?' he can be found in his office, thankful for his decades practicing self-isolation. His poetry can be found in numerous magazines and short collections sold on Amazon and a forthcoming blog on how to use modern marketing strategies to grow your own creative writing is set to debut in early 2021.

  •  Stephanie Barbé Hammer

    Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a 6-time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction and poetry with work published in The Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Pearl, the James Franco Review, Isthmus, Cafe Irreal, and the Gold Man Review. She is the author of the prose poem chapbook Sex with Buildings (dancing girl press), the full-length collection How Formal? (Spout Hill Press), the fabulist novel The Puppet Turners of Narrow Interior (Urban Farmhouse Press) and the magical realism craft book Delicious Strangeness (Spout Hill Press). Her novelette Rescue Plan is forthcoming with Bamboo Dart Press in February 2021.

  •  Tobi Harper

    Tobi Harper is Deputy Director and Marketing Director of Red Hen Press, Founder and Editor of Quill (a queer publishing series), Publisher of the Los Angeles Review, and Instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program for Publishing and Editing. Tobi has worked part-time and/or volunteered for Red Hen since 2005, while completing a BA in English Literature with an emphasis in Literature of the Environment and a Minor in Queer Studies at University of California Santa Barbara and a MA in English Literature at San Francisco State University.

  •  Tim Hatch

    Tim Hatch's work explores themes of abuse, fragility, and our human obligation to one another. His ongoing documentation about his weight-loss surgery is a fascinating look at coping, reflection, and relearning the process of living. Hatch earned his MFA at Cal State University, San Bernardino. His poetry and writing has appeared in MungBeing, Salmon Bosch, East Jasmine Review, The Vehicle, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and Apeiron Review.

  • Jude Higgins

    Jude Higgins is a flash fiction writer, tutor and writing events organizer. Her flash fiction chapbook, The Chemist’s House was published in 2017 by V.Press and her fiction  has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. She runs Bath a Flash Fiction Award and is a director of Flash Fiction Festivals, UK and of the short- short fiction press, Ad Hoc fiction. Judehiggins.com @judehwriter

  •  Bonnie Hearn Hill

    Bonnie Hearn Hill is the author of sixteen suspense novels (MIRA, Perseus, and Severn House), most recently the Kit Doyle crime-blogger series. A national contest judge, conference presenter, and mentor to numerous writers, she has co-hosted a Central California television news network’s book segment since 2002. Huelga, a film set during the Delano Grape Strike of 1965 and based on one of her books, is currently in pre-production. She lives in Fresno, California, near the San Joaquin river bluffs, where her next novel is set.

  •  Lynda Smith Hoggan

    Lynda Smith Hoggan is a Professor Emeritus of Health and Human Sexuality at Mt. San Antonio College. Her memoir pieces have been published in the Los Angeles Times and Westwind/UCLA Journal of the Arts, and she blogs at lyndasmithhoggan.com.

  •  Kendall Johnson

    Kendall Johnson, former firefighter with military experience, served as traumatic stress consultant—often in the field—specializing in Incident Command System Class I & II commands. Initially working with individual and small team line personnel, His responsibilities evolved to provide consultation to field commanders and their operational teams, and, when necessary, provide intervention in order to maintain team effectiveness in the midst of incidents that had turned traumatic. He has lectured in fire houses, hospitals, emergency service institutes, conferences, government training facilities, universities, here and abroad.

    He trained others in the principles he developed. Dr. Johnson was Adjunct Faculty member at the California State Training Institute (Governor’s Office of Emergency Services), served on the Faculty of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, and was Associate Professor in the Master’s Degree program in Emergency Services Management at California State University, Long Beach.

    He has authored a number of professional papers, seven books in the treatment of traumatic stress, school crisis management, and recovery. Recently Dr. Johnson retired from teaching to pursue painting, photography, and writing. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history.

  •  Michaelsun Knapp

    Michaelsun Knapp is an enrolled member of the Costanoan-Rumsen Carmel Band of Ohlone Indians raised Seneca and an MFA graduate at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Lo Rez program by way of Los Angeles County with a BA in English lit from C.S.U. San Bernardino and two A.A.s from Mount San Antonio College. Nominated for a 2016 Pushcart, and winner of the Muse Times Two Poetry Award, he is also a 2016 Periphery Poets Fellow, former poetry editor for Mud City, and has curated the 2017 Claremont West Reading Series. He has published over 80 pieces across the United States and Internet and now adjuncts in various English departments around California’s Inland Empire.

  •  Yi Shun Lai

    Yi Shun Lai (say "yeeshun" for her first name) is the author of a memoir, Pin Ups (Homebound Publications, 2020) and a novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu (Shade Mountain Press, 2016).

    She is a writer and editor living in Southern California. Her column about writing and publishing, "From the Front Lines," appears every month in The Writer magazine. She teaches in the MFA programs at Bay Path and Southern New Hampshire Universities, and at weekend retreats around the country.

    She was, for a time, the youngest-ever writer for the legendary J. Peterman catalog. And that was before "Seinfeld" discovered it.

  •  AJ Orona

    AJ Orona is a literary critic and former automotive journalist whose writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Street Trucks and Mazda.com. He now covers architecture, theme parks and travel. His perfect day off would be spent boogie boarding and eating Zankou Chicken. Whenever in a foreign city, AJ tries to learn enough of the language to pass as a local. He was successful in Paris and Jerusalem.

  •  Shannon Phillips

    Shannon Phillips is the founding editor of Carnival, an online literary magazine, which she eventually transitioned into Picture Show Press. She is also the co-founder of the annual Mother’s Day poetry reading at Gatsby Books and the recipient of the 28th Moon Prize from Writing In A Woman’s Voice. Her most recent chapbook, Body Parts, was published by dancing girl press.

  •  Rich Soos

    Rich Soos is a teacher, poet and musician, and has been published in over 200 print magazines. He has 20 books of poetry, including Somersaults With Life (2016) , Parting/Departing (2015) , Bringing In The Sheets (2012) . His books may be purchased at on-line bookstores, such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. His poetry appears online in Peacock Journal, Tuck, Leaves of Ink, Micropoetry, Random Poem Tree, Cuento, In Between Hangovers, and others. His video poems may be viewed on YouTube. He blogs at rsoos.com.

  • Crystal Lane “CLS” Swift, PhD

    Crystal Lane “CLS” Swift, PhD is a Pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes.  She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections: God Bless Paul, Soup Stories: A Reconstructed Memoir, and Writing Our Love Story, and two chapbooks: The Way We Were and Tumbleweed: Against All Odds.  She is raising her daughter with her love in Alhambra, CA.  

  • Kareem Tayyar

    Kareem Tayyar is a poet and novelist whose books include Magic Carpet Poems (Tebot Bach Books), Postmark Atlantis (Level Four Press), In the Footsteps of the Silver King (Spout Hill Books), and Scenes From A Good Life (Tebot Bach Books). A Professor of English at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, he holds a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Riverside. He is a recipient of a 2019 Wurlitzer Fellowship for Poetry.

  • Francesca Terzano

    Francesca Terzano grew up in the magical kingdom of the Inland Empire. She fell in love mythology at a young age because she would spend hours watching Sailor Moon and reading Harry Potter. During her time at Mt. San Antonio College she was president of the Creative Writing Club. Her poetry has been published in two online magazines: Carnival Literary Magazine and the East Jasmine Review. She has a blog theliteraryalchemyblog.wordpress.com where she writes about nerd culture and its use of mythology and folklore. Right now she is currently attending Graduate school at Cal Poly, and hoping to have her college experience come full circle and someday teach at Mt. SAC. She also loves cats.

  •  Thomas R. Thomas

    Thomas R. Thomas was born in Los Angeles, CA, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley east of LA. Currently he lives in Long Beach, CA. He has a chapbook Scorpio (Carnival), and his poems have been published in Don't Blame the Ugly Mug: 10 Years of 2 Idiots Peddling Poetry, Washing Machine Press, Creepy Gnome, Carnival, Bank Heavy Press, Pipe Dream, Conceit Magazine, Marco Polo, and Silver Birch Press. His website is thomasrthomas.org.

  • Michael Torres

    Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com

  • K. Andrew Turner

    K. Andrew Turner writes queer, literary, and speculative prose and poetry. In 2013, he founded East Jasmine Review—an electronic literary journal. His full-length poetry collection Heart, Mind, Blood, Skin is now available from Finishing Line Press. He was a semifinalist for the 2016 Luminaire Award. You can find more at his website: www.kandrewturner.com

  • Syd Bartman

    Syd started teaching English at Mt. SAC in 1984 passionate about sharing great literature with others.  In 1990, she inherited English 9-Writing the Personal Journal, a nontransferable, not required course that filled every year from 1990-2010 when the college decided it could no longer be offered. Seeing the demise of journal on the horizon, in 2005, Syd developed Creative Writing Memoir and Creative Writing Nonfiction to carry on the work she so loved in the journal class.  She has had the great honor to offer these two classes since then.  From early on in the personal journal class, it became abundantly clear that her passion had changed to helping others bring forth THEIR great literature.

 Art Workshops

• • Ron Husband

    Ron Husband, a 38-year veteran of The Walt Disney Company retired as a character artist from the Walt Disney Consumer Products Division.  Ron joined Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1975 as an animation trainee and worked for 30 years in that department.  He holds the distinction of being the first African American animator & the first African American supervising animator for Walt Disney Studios.

    After graduating from Monrovia High School Ron attended and received his AA Degree in Art from Citrus College, Glendora, CA and his Bachelor of Art degree in 1973 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Ron has taught animation and character design at Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, CA. He has taught animation, drawing, conducted workshops and lectured at Xavier Univ. New Orleans, LA; Gnomon School of Visual Arts, Hollywood, CA; Mt. San Antonio, College, Walnut, CA; Cal Arts in Valencia, California; Sam Houston State Univ. Huntsville TX; Atlanta, Georgia; Ontario, Canada; Edinboro Univ., Edinboro, PA; Art Institute of California-Inland Empire, San Bernardino, CA and as far away as Mexico City, Mexico, Sydney, Australia and Tokyo, Japan.

  • Jennifer King

    Jennifer King is a Los Angeles based painter and adjunct professor. She graduated from California State University Fullerton with a BFA in Painting and Drawing in 2011 and from Claremont Graduate University with an MFA in studio art in 2017. She currently teaches studio art at Mt San Antonio College, California State University Fullerton, and Riverside City College. Her medium of choice is oil paint, and her work can be viewed at http://www.jenniferkingart.com

  • Nikki Lewis

    Nikki Lewis is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who has worked in the field of ceramics for over 25 years.  Lewis received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Lewis is full-time faculty in Ceramics at Mt. San Antonio College and is widely exhibited.  She has lectured on ceramics locally at the American Museum of Ceramic Art and the Beatrice Woods Center and internationally at the Bauhaus University, Germany.  

  •  Melissa Macias

    Melissa Macias is a practicing artist and professor at Mt. San Antonio College, where she currently serves as the Mt. SAC Art Club advisor.  She received her BA and MFA from California State University, Long Beach.  Her personal work explores ideas of memory and mythmaking through mixed media and installation. 

  •  Luis Mendoza

    Born in Los Angeles, and raised in Mexico, Luis Mendoza is an artist and current animation student at Mt. San Antonio College, where he also works as a student ambassador.  He brings his unique artistic depictions to life through his experience with character design and his background in art.  In one of his current projects, Luis has begun work on creating his own cartoon with a team of Mexican animators.  These animators have created a community for low-income artists where artists have the opportunity to experience a studio setting and collaborate with other like-minded people. Luis has also participated in conferences in Mexico, exploring the struggles of being Mexican in the United States including navigating his career path as an animator.

  •  Katie Queen

    Katie Queen was born and spent her early years in Northern Colorado in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and later years on the plains of northeastern Boulder County.  Queen has lived and worked in urban Los Angeles since 2003.

    Katie Queen is a mix media artist, preferring to work in clay, wood, fiber and painting. Classically trained as a ceramic artist, Queen praises traditional techniques and methods but is innovative in her alternative approaches to predominant material clay.  Her work is process orientated through repetition and remarks on the indicative ties of the natural and forced man-made world. The biomorphic/geometric objects she creates reflect her ideas of what is tangible, what is imaginary, and what is imposed upon us from forces beyond our control.  Her work presents formal concerns in composition and structure combined with loose, palpable explorations.  Queen explores the symbolism of such edifices as the square, grid, and arch in a tactile fashion.  Even though we perceive these elements as strong and solid, they are foreshadowed by the cumbersome and chaotic methods Queen employs.

    Katie is one-half of the curatorial team Q&L Projects, an unassociated art cooperative working with a multitude of exhibition spaces and institutions including the Bauhaus 100 lecture series in Weimer, Germany and the Craft in American Center Los Angeles, CA., as well as other institutions.   

     Queen earned her undergraduate degree in 2000 at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri and received her MFA in 2003 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Queen was an artist-in-residence at the Worcester Center for Crafts in Worcester, Massachusetts 2000 and Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska in 2017. She is an Assistant Professor at Los Angeles Valley College and an Adjunct Professor at Mount San Antonio College.

  •  Cuyler Smith
     Inspired by visual storytelling, Cuyler obtained his BFA in animation from Laguna College of Art and Design and his MFA in illustration from California State University Fullerton. Cuyler's pop culture inspired illustrations have been featured in the New York Post, Entertainment Weekly, and Cineplex Magazine.  His clients include: Sony Pictures, Lionsgate Pictures, AMC Pictures, HBO, ThinkGeek, Sony PlayStation, Fandango, TSN, and the LA Kings to name a few. Cuyler continues to enhance and adapt his passion and technique as a visual communicator while being a professor and freelance illustrator. 
  • Melanie Florio

    Melanie Florio is a California-based fine artist and illustrator.  

    Melanie's work celebrates modern life through a nostalgic lens that offers an open-ended and subtle narrative. Her work captures the everyday iconography with a touch of whimsy. 

    For the Culturama workshop she is going to give a demo on how to paint clouds in different color palettes to create different moods! She is excited to share what she knows and see how far each student can take their skyscape

Library Workshops

• • Eva Rios-Alvarado

    Eva Rios-Alvarado attributes her empowerment, spirituality, and beautiful-resistance from Xicana and Black Feminist practice. With a B.A. in Geography and M.S., in Library Information Science, she works alongside community college students exploring and crafting their unique information literacy repertoires. Currently, she is the Student Equity & Outreach Librarian at Mt. San Antonio College Library. If you ask Eva what is the most powerful force in leadership she would answer love, the power of community, the creativity of local activism, and daily resistance you find in your personal life. #XicanaMLIS #LAallDay #librarianOfColor #LocLA #Decolonize #POCinLIS 

    Mt. SAC Library  

    www.mtsac.edu/library  

    In her workshop, you will learn:  The great thing about zines is that you can make them what you want them to be – there is NO FORMULA! 

    Libraries are some of the greatest FREE tools for your zines. Plus, building a zine can be as easy as you want it to be. This workshop is for anyone who wants to get creative and explore! Let the library resources help you with some of your zine pre-planning and building. For instance, do you need help finding/choosing a zine topic? Do you need supporting evidence or sources for your zine making? Or maybe you just want an inspiration jump start? Everyone will leave this workshop with a unique zine for their zine planning work.  

    Learn how to find a topic for your zines with library resources  
    Use online library resources to support the topic 
    Get experience making a digital zine for your zine planning  
    Leave with a plan and next steps for your zine making