Made in L.A. Vol. 4

Nick Duretta is a writer based in Pasadena, California. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, screenwriter, and a corporate communications manager, managing communication programs for Fortune 500 corporations. His current project is the Rick Chasen series of mystery novels taking place on English walking paths. When not hunched over his keyboard, he is out enjoying his second-favorite pastime, walking in the Southern California mountains.

J. P. Higgins writes fiction and poetry intended to arouse a reader’s curiosity, interest, reflection, understanding, humor, inspiration, and enjoyment (usually not all at once, but, of course, anything may happen). Higgins lives in Los Angeles. “Living, Dead, and In-Between” in this volume of the Made in L.A. anthology is Higgins’ first fiction in print.

Kate Mo writes and lives in Los Angeles. She writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays about Japanese Americans and the effect of intergenerational trauma (incarceration camps, anti-miscegenation laws, model minority myth). She has published creative nonfiction in Out of Anonymity as well as literary articles on Ai, Harriet Doerr, David Henry Hwang, and Terrence McNally in the Encyclopedia of American Literature. Her short stories “Java Defense” and “Dead-End Street” appeared in The Crescent Review and Blue Guitar Midstream respectively.

Karter Mycroft is an author, editor, musician, and fisheries scientist from Los Angeles. Karter writes on the beach by asking the dead fish for ideas. You can find them on Twitter @kartermycroft or online at kartermycroft.com.

Catie Jarvis is an author of fiction, a yoga instructor, a competitive gymnastics coach, and an English and writing professor. She received her BA in writing from Ithaca College, and her MFA in creative writing from the California College of the Arts. She grew up on a lake in northern New Jersey and now lives near the ocean in California with her husband, daughter, and lots of surfboards. She finds the world to be a strange place and loves writing that examines the ambiguity of “reality.” Her debut novel, The Peacock Room, is available on Amazon. Find more about the author and her writing at catiejarvis.com and 30inLA.com.

Sasha Kildare, author of Intact: Untangle the Web of Bipolar Depression, Addiction and Trauma, is a speaker, mental health advocate, educator, and mom. Some of her feature articles have appeared in bp Magazine and Esperanza.

Visit her storytelling blog that delves into the creative process and how to stave off depression and compulsivity at DrivenToTellStories.com. 

Janna Layton was born in San Jose, has lived in San Francisco and Oakland, and now resides in Walnut Creek, near the base of Mt. Diablo. Despite being a lifelong resident of the SF Bay Area, she loves and respects Los Angeles (the fact that she is not a baseball fan probably helps). Her fiction has been published in various places, including The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Colored Lens, Luna Station Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and the anthology Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove. She tweets at @jkbartleby.

Visit her storytelling blog that delves into the creative process and how to stave off depression and compulsivity at DrivenToTellStories.com. 

Aatif Rashid is the author of the novel Portrait of Sebastian Khan (2019). He has published short stories in The Massachusetts Review, Arcturus, Barrelhouse, Triangle House Review, and X-R-A-Y, among other places, and nonfiction in The Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Chicana feminist and former rodeo queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University
Los Angeles and is a PhD candidate at USC. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and featured in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her YA novel, Breaking Pattern, is forthcoming with Inlandia Books. She’s a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit. Find out more at http://tishareichle.com/

Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley is a Dominican American creative nonfiction writer, award-winning filmmaker, and mother of two. Her work has appeared in Harvard’s Palabritas, NYU’s Latinx Project, and Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology.

She writes from the feminist point of view of the bilingual, bicultural brown girl and woman. Her memoir-in-progress, Late Bloomer, is a collection of essays about a Dominican mother/daughter relationship. Lucy advocates for representation of BIPOC women and non-binary writers. She is the Chapters Liaison for Women Who Submit, and leads the Long Beach, California chapter of the organization.

Amy Jones Sedivy grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in the NELA neighborhood of Highland Park with her artist-husband and their princess-dog. She has a Master’s in English with an emphasis on writing, and she now teaches English at a small independent school in Pasadena. Her favorite activity besides reading is driving through the different neighborhoods of L.A., especially the roads less traveled.

Most recent publications include “This Does Not Exist” (2017) and “Anaphora” (2018) in Write Launch online literary magazine, and “The Rhinos of Josephine” in (mac)ro(mic), July 2021.

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Cristina is now a long-term resident of Atwater Village, close to Griffith Park. Travel has always been in her blood, and her first job was in Hong Kong as a radio journalist. Since then, she has visited in over sixty countries on business and for pleasure.

During her career as managing director of an international training company in London, she authored three non-fiction books on public speaking and media relations. Recently, she completed her first novel and has written several short stories, and she is delighted that one of them is included in this anthology.

Rachael Warecki has attended residencies at MacDowell and Ragdale and holds an MFA in fiction from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is also a 2021–22 BookEnds Fellow and an emerita member of the Women Who Submit leadership team. Her novel-in-progress, The Split Decision — set in the same world as “The Long Drop” — was a finalist in the 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest. Her short work has received the Tiferet Prize, semifinalist honors in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest and the Boulevard Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a Best of the Net nomination, and her stories have appeared in various publications.

Deborah Weiss is a Los Angeles-based lawyer and writer who teaches legal writing and analysis at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She lives in Topanga with her husband, son, parrots, goats, dog, cat, turtle, and chickens. She is the program liaison for Habele Foundation, whose mission is to enhance STEM education for K-12 students in the Federated States of Micronesia. When she is not litigating or teaching, she spends her time hiking with her dog and cleaning up countless different types of animal poop. Deborah’s work has appeared in the Independent, Salon, and Westways Magazine.

Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, slam poetry coach, and writer who was made in Los Angeles and still calls it home. She has published work in The Sun, Bellevue Literary Review, Integrated Schools, Mutha Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Rising Phoenix Review, and other journals. She is a proud public-school teacher in LAUSD and was a 2020 finalist for California Teacher of the Year. Since November 2008, she has shepherded more than two thousand students through National Novel Writing Month.