Diana Burbano

Diana Burbano, a Colombian immigrant, is an Equity actress and a respected teaching artist at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA. She has created notable roles in the world premieres of The Labors of Hercules at the Laguna Playhouse, Imagine at South Coast Repertory and Sweet Peace at Center Theatre in Santa Barbara. She directs, produces, writes and manages Sleep Till Noon Productions. Diana is a member of the inaugural writers circle for Latino Theatre Association/ Los Angeles. Her play Fabulous Monsters was a selection of Fullerton College’s 25th Annual Playwrights Festival 2015, the 1st Playwrights Nest Festival at Los Angeles Theatre Center and OC-Centric Playwrights Festival 2015. Silueta, her play with collaborators Tom and Chris Shelton, was a Playlab selection at the Great Plains Theater Conference, and was one of 4 productions at the Cygnet Theatre’s Playwrights in Process Festival 2014.

Sunil Patel

Book reviews, movie reviews, comics reviews, television reviews (primarily sci-fi/fantasy/horror). Diversity and representation, and the double-edged sword of being a POC writer. I also write fiction and plays, and I frequently talk about submissions and rejections and how to deal with that process.

Ayesha Mattu

In addition have written opinion pieces for magazines and websites including CNN.com, Religion Dispatches, Huffington Post. My writing highlights the fantastic diversity of the American Muslim community in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religious practice (orthodox, cultural and secular),

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Andrea Gutierrez

Most of my clips have been in recent or upcoming issues of make/shift magazine, a print publication, where I am also the assistant editor. Clips include a write-up of the first women and climate change conference in Bali in 2014, an interview with one of the co-founders of Radical Monarchs (formerly Radical Brownies), and a review of the book “Compañeras” Zapatista Women’s Stories.” I was also the copy desk chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, managing copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading of their web and print properties.

Angie Chau

ANGIE CHAU is the author of Quiet As They Come (IG Publishing,2010), which was a Finalist in First Fiction for The California Book Award and a Finalist in Fiction for the Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Award. She is the recipient of the Maurice Prize in Fiction and has been awarded an Anderson Center Residency, Hedgebrook Residency, Macondo Foundation Fellowship, and was most recently the 2013 Walter Stiern Library PG&E Writer in Residence. Her short stories have appeared in the Indiana Review, Santa Clara Review, Night Train Magazine, and the 2012 Hey Day Books anthology, New California Writing, and other publications. She was born in Vietnam has lived a nomadic life moving to Italy, Spain, Malaysia, and Hawaii. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto where she is working on her latest novel. She currently calls the Bay Area home. www.angiechau.com

“Angie Chau’s fine collection of stories does for immigrants from South Vietnam what Jhumpa Lahiri did for East Indians or Junot Diaz did for people from the Dominican Republic. She tells their truth.”—Dallas Morning News

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Yezmin Villarreal

I was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I went to a Quaker liberal arts college in the south (Greensboro, North Carolina) and I studied abroad in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. I am 25 years old. I love to write.

Lilian Min

I played a brass instrument in college marching band and am currently working on the multimedia web project Zodiac Cafe.

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