Montserrat Fontes

Montserrat Fontes spent her early childhood near the Texas-Mexico border, the setting for her novel, First Confession, which details in surprising and gripping fashion the secret world of two children approaching a momentous occasion in their lives. Fontes teaches advanced literature and journalism classes in Los Angeles while pursuing her studies of Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers, and completing work on a “prequel” to her first novel.

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Diane Wood Middlebrook, poet, literary critic and professor of English at Stanford University, chronicles with sensitivity and compassion the metamorphosis of a poorly educated “mad housewife” into a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in her resently released book, Anne Sexton: A Biography. Among Middlebrook’s other publications are Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, edited with Diana George, and a collection of her own poetry, Gin Considered as a Demon.

Marcia Muller

Marcia Muller, a former English literature and journalism major, created the role model for all contemporary women p.i.’s in Sharon McCone, heroine of eleven mysteries. Besides its stay-up-till-its-over plot, her latest, Where Echoes Live, is enriched by the idea that courage to change one’s life does not belong solely to youth and by its setting in fictionalized Mono Lake and Bodie, California.

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Laura Shamas

Prize-winning playwright Laura Shamas has given Los Angeles three productions in recent months: Delicacies; Telling Time; and Lady-Like which will open in Philadelphia and New York soon. Another twelve of her plays have been produced and eight are in publication, together with her new book Playwriting.

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Janet Sternburg

What makes women write? In The Writer on Her Work, Volumes I & II, Janet Sternburg has gathered answers from more than three dozen major American women writers. Authors as diverse as Alice Walker, Joan Didion and Jan Morris talk about what it means to be a woman and a writer. Sternburg’s work provides an excellent guide to some of the most important and interesting women writing today.

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Susan Straight

Susan Straight writes from the unique perspective of a white woman immersed in the black community in which she lives. Her gifts are acute perception and a breathtaking ability to express what her heart discovers. The epiphanies of Aquaboogie: A Novel in Stories illuminate the delicate balance Straight’s characters maintain as they evolve within their culture and the wider world. Her second novel is Living Large.

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Mitsuye Yamada

Born in Japan, raised in Seattle, survivor of an Idaho internment camp, Mitsuye Yamada reflects a unique cultural heritage in her collections of poetry and prose. Camp Notes and Other Poems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories draw on her experiences as an Asian-American woman and an advocate for human rights. Said one reviewer, “Yamada’s poetry and prose resonate with wit, power and poignancy.”

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Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, received the American Book Award for fiction in 1991. She has also conceived and written performance-art pieces for the Japanese-American Museum and the Taper, Too. Currently she is at work on Burajiru, a novel about Japanese immigration to Brazil scheduled to be published next fall.