THE 33rd ANNUAL
FOOTHILL WRITERS' CONFERENCE
Speakers

Alan Cheuse
	Alan Cheuse is the author of the novels The Bohemians (1982), The Grandmother's Club (1986), and The Light Possessed (1990), plus three collections of short fiction, Candace and Other Stories (1980), The Tennessee Waltz (1991), and Lost and Old Rivers (1998), as well as the nonfiction work Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey (1987). For more than a quarter of a century, Cheuse has served as book commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered.” His novel To Catch the Lightning was published this past autumn and was awarded the 2009 Grub Street National Prize for Fiction. His collection of travel essays, A Trance After Breakfast, will appear in June 2009. And with novelist and University of Michigan Professor of English Nicholas Delbanco, he is the co-author of the forthcoming three-volume Literature: Craft & Voice. www.alancheuse.com/
Justin Chin
	Justin Chin's third book of poetry, Gutted (Manic D Press), received the Publishing Triangle's 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Awards. His other books of poetry are Bite Hard, & Harmless Medicine (Manic D Press), which was a finalist in the 2002 Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Awards, and the Asian American Literary Awards. He is also the author of three collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press), Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press), & Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms (Suspect Thoughts Press). Photo by R.E. Morrison.
Jane Ciabattari
	Jane Ciabattari is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Her short stories have been published in KBG Bar Lit, LOST magazine, Chautauqua magazine, Literary Mama, VerbSap, Ms. Magazine (nominated for O. Henry and Pushcart awards), The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hampton Shorts (which honored her with an Editors' Choice STUBBY Award), The East Hampton Star, Blueline, Caprice, and Redbook, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award. Her story "Payback Time" was a Pushcart Prize "special mention." Her story "How I Left Onandaga County" appears in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction (November 2006, Stolen Time Press) and also was a Pushcart Prize honorable mention. She serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle and is a regular blogger on the NBCC board blog, Critical Mass. For more information and links to stories: www.janeciabattari.com.
Lesley Dauer
	Lesley Dauer grew up in California and Illinois and received degrees from Middlebury College, the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and Harvard University. She returned to the Bay Area, where she teaches at Foothill College. Lesley's poems have appeared in a number of journals, including GrandStreet, New England Review, and Poetry, and several anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets (University Press of New England). The Fragile City, her first book of poems, won the Bluestem Award. Garrison Keillor has read her work on National Public Radio.
Sharon Doubiago
	Sharon Doubiago has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably, the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the book-length poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the stories The Book of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Graywolf), which in 2005 was selected to the list, Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Hazel Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast. Volume one of her memoir, My Father's Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Girl, will be published next year. She's an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota.
Danielle Haysbert
	Danielle Haysbert is originally from East Palo Alto, California. After completing high school in Elk Grove, California, she moved back to the Bay Area to attend San Jose State University. Her current major is Forensic Biology and she will graduate in May 2009. Danielle published her first novel, Street Song, in October of 2008. She enjoys reading anything from fiction to the great existential realm of philosophy and using it to connect with reality and with others who enjoy reading. Danielle is currently working on her second piece, which includes a full book of poetry prized from her childhood until today.
Scott Inguito
	Scott Inguito, a poet, painter and educator, teaches writing and critical thinking at San Jose Community College.  Recent poems have appeared in Shampoo (shampoo.com), and his paintings can be seen at scottinguito.com.  Scott Inguito's book, DEAR JACK, finds Scott in a one-way communiqué with the dead poet Jack Spicer.  Resuscitating the plaintive, the lyrical, the lettrestic, Scott Inguito's DEAR JACK strains to listen to what the dead seek to speak. Among what he hears are warnings about the dangers of desire, teachings for divas, offerings on what to wear to a garden party.
Linda Janakos
	L.D. Janakos is fiction writer, poet, and filmmaker. She is the author of the novel oldest show (after the abandonment) and a poetry chapbook The Letter. She has received several awards for her writing: a Bumbershoot Literary Award in Fiction, a University of Oregon Award in Fiction, and several finalist awards including one for the Plover Press Nivola Award in Fiction and one for the National Fiction Award given by FC2 (Fiction Collective II, an imprint of Black Ice Books). She is currently working on Brancusi's Back. http://janakos.blogspot.com/
Avotcja Jiltonilro
	Avotcja Jiltonilro is a poet, composer, musician and published author. She has opened for Betty Carter. She's played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Luis & Bobi Cespedes and John Handy, Dimensions Dance Theater and Nikki Giovanni, and with the Diamano Coura West African Dance Company. She has performed at Lorraine Hansberry Theater in San Francisco, the Scottish Rite Temple & Yoshi's in Oakland, Club le Monmartre in Copenhagen, at Stanford University, and has been featured four times for Afro Solo. Avotcja was the Staff Storyteller for Louisah Teish's "Word Conjurers," and she's founder and co-director of "The Clean Scene Theater Project/Proyecto Tea tral de la Escena Sobria." Avotcja teaches poetry, creative writing, music & drama in the public schools and the penal system. She is a member of the National Writers' Union - all this while living with multiple sclerosis.
Carol Lem
	Carol Lem teaches creative writing and literature at East Los Angeles College. Her work appears in such publications as Asian Pacific American Journal, Bloomsbury Review, The Illinois Review, Onthebus, Visions International, and others. Her books include Searchings, Grassroots, Don't Ask Why, The Hermit, The Hermit's Journey: Tarot Poems for Meditation, Moe (Remembrance), and The Shadow of the Plum. A reading of selected poems from her current book, Shadow of the Plum, may be heard on her CD, Shadow of the Bamboo, with music by Masakazu Yoshizawa. In 2002, her poem, "Japanese American National Museum Concert," was one of eight poems selected for the Sense of Site postcard series, which was made possible in part by grants from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and the Durfee Foundation. www.carollem.com
Barbara Jane Reyes
	Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, entitled Diwata, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010. Her chapbooks, Easter Sunday (2008) and Cherry (2008), are published by Ypolita Press and Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, respectively. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.
Michelle Richmond
	Michelle Richmond is the author of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller The Year of Fog, as well as the novels No One You Know and Dream of the Blue Room, and the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hillsdale Award for Fiction, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Oxford American, and Elsewhere. A native of Alabama, she lives in San Francisco.
Doren Robbins
	Doren Robbins' is the author of nine collections, including Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry, and Driving Face Down, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize (Lynx House Press, Eastern Washington University, 2001). Robbins has received a state fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, as well as prizes, grants, and awards from Passaic Poetry Center, the Loft Foundation, The Centrum Residency Program, The Judah Magnes Museum, The Lane Literary Guild, The Seattle Arts Commission, and The California Arts Council. Currently, he is professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Foothill College. His new book of poems, My Piece of the Puzzle, is just out from Eastern Washington University. www.Dorenrobbins.com.
Floyd Salas
	Floyd Salas is an award-winning and critically-acclaimed author of seven books, including the novels Tattoo the Wicked Cross, What Now My Love, Lay My Body on the Line, and State of Emergency, the memoir Buffalo Nickel, and two books of poetry, Color of My Living Heart and, most recently, Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats. He was 2002-2003 Regent's Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, as well as staff writer for the NBC drama series, Kingpin and the recipient of NEA, California Arts Council, Rockefeller Foundation, and other fellowships and awards, including two UCB outstanding teaching fellowships.  www.floydsalas.com
Tony Tulathimutte
	Tony Tulathimutte is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Threepenny Review and Frank. His story "Scenes from the Life of the Only Girl in Water Shield, Alaska" received an O. Henry Award in 2008. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford University in 2005 and 2006, where he studied cognitive sciences and fiction writing. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, he currently lives in San Francisco.
Marianne Villanueva
	Marianne Villanueva has a Masters in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals including The Threepenny Review, ZYZZYVA, The Literary Review, and Puerto Del Sol. She was a finalist for the O. Henry Literature Prize, and has twice been a recipient of a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship. Her first short story collection, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Press), was one of five finalists for the Philippines' National Book Award. Her second manuscript of short stories, Mayor of the Roses, was a semi-finalist for the Sarabande Prize, and was published in 2005 by Miami University Press, which chose it as the inaugural publication of the press's fiction series. In 2007, Villanueva was awarded the Juked Prize for Fiction. She teaches English at Foothill College and at Notre Dame de Namur University.
R.J. Ward
	R.J. WARD is a screenwriter and filmmaker who has written feature scripts for major studios and indies, including MGM, Paramount, A&M, Fox and CBS. He wrote and is an executive producer on "The James Dean Garage Band", based on a short story by Rick Moody "The Ice Storm", which will be shot in British Columbia this Fall in association with Sepia Films and Spice Factory Ltd. He has taught Film & Video at UC Irvine, UC San Diego and Foothill College.
Kim Silveira Wolterbeek
	Kim Silveira Wolterbeek's fiction has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Bellowing Ark, Buffalo Spree, CALYX, City Primeval: Narratives of Urban Reality, New Millennium Writings, Other Voices, Ratapallax, Room of One's Own, Santa Clara Review, West Wind Review, Willow Springs, been anthologized in A Line of Cutting Women (CALYX) and has been read on National Public Radio's "The Sound of Writing." She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of The Glass Museum (Bellowing Ark Press), a collection of eleven inter-related stories that depict the life of a woman from childhood to adulthood. She is currently at work on a novel.
Al Young
	Al Young is the author of more than 22 books, including Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Still and Frames (The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson), Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry, Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006, The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000, and Heaven: Poems 1957-1990. Widely anthologized and translated, his work has carried him throughout the world (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the whole of the United States), and earned him praise from Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the New York Times. A beloved teacher, Young has taught writing, literature and creativity at Stanford, the University of California at Santa Cruz, San José State University, and the University of Michigan. From 2005 through 2008 he served as poet laureate of California. The Sea, The Sky, And You, And I, a poetry & jazz CD came out this year from Bardo Digital. For more information, go to www.alyoung.org.

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