Summer 2015

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the memoir Sick (HarperPerennial, forthcoming 2018), as well as the novels The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove, 2007). Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many other publications.

Lili Loofbourow is the staff critic at The Week. She is working on several projects including a novel, a book of cultural criticism, and a book of essays.

Kay Ryan is a former US Poet Laureate. Her poetry collections include Erratic Facts (Grove, 2015) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove, 2010). Her many awards include a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the National Humanities Medal. A resident of Marin County, Ryan grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert, California.

Tabitha Soren’s art has been featured in McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine,and Sports Illustrated. Her photography appears in the Oakland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She was selected for the AI-AP Best of American Photography Collection. The images in the Spring 2016 issue are based on her latest series, “Surface Tension.”

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of several books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time (Sasquatch, 2018); Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (California, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2002), which won a California Book Award. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015, and teaches at the University of Southern California.