Moderator
Jenny Bitner’s short stories have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Sun, PANK, The Fabulist, Fence, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Writing That Risks. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Anything That Moves, Utne Reader, Men’s Health and other publications. She is a hypnotherapist and teaches classes combining trance and writing. 

Authors

Pia Chatterjee was granted the 2011 SF Grotto fellowship for emerging writers. Previously, she won the Ledge fiction competition and was named a finalist for the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation scholarship. She has recently completed a novel Freeschool Street, and her stories have appeared in The Ledge, Pen Pusher(UK), and India Currents. Her personal essays have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul (India). As a freelance journalist, Pia has written articles for CNNMoney, San Francisco Business Times and others. Currently, Pia is blogging about writers and writing at SFGate.com. 

Rachel Howard
Rachel Howard's debut novel, The Risk of Us, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt April 2019. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony and member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, she is also the author of a memoir, The Lost Night, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, the New Yorker online, and the New York Times. 


Kirin Khan
Kirin is a writer living in Oakland, California, who calls
Albuquerque, New Mexico, her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan, her homeland. Kirin is an alumnus of VONA, Las Dos Brujas, and the Tin House Writers Workshop, and she is a 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, a 2018 AWP Writer to Writer Mentee, and a 2018 Steinbeck Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Margins, sPARKLE & bLINK, Your Impossible Voice, 7x7.LA, and elsewhere. Currently, Kirin is working on her first novel. 

Lisa Lerner
Lisa Lerner is the author of the New York Times Notable Book of the Year JUST LIKE BEAUTY, in development as a feature film with Lars Von Trier's Zentropa Production Company. Her children's book titles forthcoming from Heinemann in 2019 include TRULY DELICIOUS and A PERFECT MESS , starring rabbits that cook. →

Itoro Udofia
Itoro Udofia is a first generation Nigerian writer, cultural worker, educator, and singer-songwriter based in Oakland, CA. You can find some of her writing in Slice Magazine, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and the anthology Two Countries: US Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents published by Red Hen Press. 

Olga Zilberbourg
Raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Olga Zilberbourg makes her home in San Francisco, California. Her third book of fiction in Russian was published by Moscow-based Vremya Press in 2016. Her English-language fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Feminist Studies, Confrontation, World Literature Today, Tin House’s The Open Bar, Narrative Magazine, Outpost19’s Golden State anthology, The Common, and other print and online publication. Essays and book reviews have been in the San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, and The Common. Her work won the 2017 San Francisco’s Litquake Writing Contest and the 2016 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize. She serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.