Kelli McNeil-Yellen is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Drama. Her first feature, The Baltimore School of Charm, won first place at the UCLA Extension Feature Film Screenwriting Contest and was a top 15% finisher in the Academy’s Nicholl Awards. Most recently, she’s been screening her authentically cast feature film, DARUMA, on the festival circuit. After two sold-out screenings at Slamdance in 2024, two-time Oscar winner Peter Farrelly joined the film as...

Teresa Yang, DDS is the author of the award-winning book, Nothing But The Tooth: An Insider’s Guide to Dental Health. She has practiced dentistry for over 30 years. Yang has taught clinical dentistry and patient management at UCLA School of Dentistry, where she is a member of the Board of Counselors. She is also a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board and has written extensively on dental topics. Dr. Yang lives in Los Angeles, California. Have you ever visited a new dentist and been...

Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Randolph College. And Not / And Yet...

Michael Jann is an Emmy-nominated late-night comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for over two decades. Michael teaches screenwriting at UCLA-Extension. He co-wrote and co-produced the short animated film Bug Therapy (www.bugtherapy.film). It’s a story about a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood. This story is deeply personal: Mike’s son suffered a severe mental-breakdown at age 29, resulting in hospitalizations and psych wards. ...

Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her MA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA. In Sylvia’s Second Act, Sylvia’s husband’s cheating on her. She hates Boca. Sylvia is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. She’s moving back to the city of her dreams—with her best friend, Evie, in tow. When...

I Was a Teenage Dominatrix is the true story of one woman’s quest for self-education, in academia and beyond. Kenney wrote a sex work memoir before the term ‘sex work’ was commonplace, unwittingly becoming part of what the New York Times dubbed the ‘sex work literati’ of the early 2000s. Shawna is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, and most recently, Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital 1988-1998...

Jarrod Shusterman is the New York Times and international bestselling author of Dry, Roxy and Retro. His collaboration in Gleanings, the fourth installment of the bestselling Scythe trilogy, is being adapted for the screen by Universal. He writes for the screen and teaches courses at UCLA in creative writing. Sofía Lapuente is an author, screenwriter, professor at UCLA, and avid world traveler who immigrated from Spain to the United States to realize her dream of storytelling. Jarrod and...

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre writer, she has published work in New England Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and several journals and anthologies. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting her manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” Daniel’s...

Jeff Bonnett is a writer/filmmaker who began his career in Hollywood as a script reader. From there, his first pitch and subsequent screenplay became a film released on the Hallmark channel in 2015, titled “Love by the Book”. His latest screenplay, “Falling for Christmas” was released on Netflix last November, where it premiered at #1, was in Netflix’s Top Ten movie list in 92 countries, and was the top U.S. streaming movie across all platforms in its second week running. Before the holiday...

Nancy Pine holds a PhD in Education and is a professor emerita at Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles, where she directed the Elementary Education Program and the Bridging Cultures US/China Program. She has done cross-cultural research in China and the United States for over 20 years, has published over 30 education and research articles, many related to China or cross-cultural learning and has given talks and workshops throughout the United States and internationally. Dr. Pine has spent...

Denise Cruz-Castino is a Latina screenwriter whose first produced movie, 5 Weddings premiered at Cannes in 2018. It starred Rajkummar Rao of the Oscar nominated film The White Tiger, with co-stars Bo Derek and Candy Clark, and played in 52 countries. Her latest animated children’s horror shorts that she sold to DreamworksTV are on Peacock’s streaming series Spine Chilling Stories. She sold a live action short, The Fountain, to Disney, her horror short, Imaginary Friends, was produced by...

Sana Balagamwala grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied English Literature at the University of Southern California, and has a Masters in Education from Loyola Marymount University. Her debut novel, House Number 12, Block Number 3 was published by Hidden Shelf Publishing House in 2021 and won the Foreword Indies Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. It has also been nominated for the Martin Cruz Smith Award by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. She lives in Los Angeles,...

Tamika is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is author of speculative fiction collection, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of horror novella Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has producing credits...

Julia Camara is a Brazilian writer/filmmaker. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, she freelanced for years as a Portuguese translator for film and television subtitling. She has written and directed several award-winning short films. Her feature directorial debut In Transit, an experimental drama shot mostly in one day and with improvised dialogue, won Best Experimental Film at four different festivals. Julia also wrote the sci-fi feature Area Q (starring Isaiah Washington), the road movie...

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of...

Keyonna Taylor got her break into the television industry as a staff writer on the Apple + hit workplace comedy Mythic Quest. There she penned Breaking Brad, starring Snoop Doggy Dogg. Next, she got the absolute privilege of working as story editor in the longest running live action comedy of our time, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Writing on IASIP she co-wrote The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7, the third in The Gangs trilogy of remakes of the 1987 American buddy cop action comedy...

Kristin Griffith is a writer, LGBTQ+ advocate, and product marketing consultant in the tech industry. She has several publications, including the book, Rush: Memoir of a Gay Sorority Girl, which has been featured in The Sorority Life and the Kappa Alpha Theta Magazine, and is currently being adapted into a feature film. Other publications include In Your Eyes (featured in “Secret Sisters: Stories of Being Lesbian and Bisexual in a College Sorority”) and her work was featured in the Journal of...

Shiwani Srivastava was raised on Bollywood films and the rom-coms of the 1980s. She writes screenplays examining relationships, family dynamics, and immigrant experiences through the lens of comedy, drawing on her work as a journalist and her family’s roots in India. Her romantic comedy WEDDING SEASON was released by Netflix this summer, where it debuted as one of their Top 5 films worldwide. Srivastava, repped by A3 Artists and Affirmative Entertainment, was named one of Variety’s 10...

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His debut won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for the year's top novel. The Lager Queen of Minnesota won the WILLA Literary Award and was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street...

Iris Yamashita is an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter for the movie Letters from Iwo Jima. She has been working in Hollywood for fifteen years and continues to develop for both film and streaming media. She has taught screenwriting at UCLA and is an advocate of women and diversity in the entertainment industry. City Under One Roof is her debut novel. She lives in California. In City Under One Roof, a stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone lives...

Lou Mathews has written seven books and published two of them, Just Like James and L.A. Breakdown, an LA Times Best Book. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s acclaimed creative writing program since 1989. His stories have been published in ZYZZYVA, New England Review, Short Story, Black Clock , Paperback L.A. , and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, and passionate cook, as well as a former mechanic, street racer, and...

Catherine Klatzker is a retired pediatric ICU nurse, mother of three, and mental health advocate. Her personal essays have been published in multiple journals as well as her contributions to two mental health anthologies. She currently resides and writes in Los Angeles, California, where she has taken numerous UCLA Extension Writing classes since 2000. Her memoir, You Will Never Be Normal, was released in May, 2021. It is her first book. In You Will Never Be Normal, Klatzker navigates...

Gabe Gabriel is a queer South African filmmaker based between Cape Town and Los Angeles where they have been working as a writer, director, actor, and independent film producer since 2013. Most recently, Gabe has penned such works as ‘Granny Lee’, a feel-good South African dramedy about a real-life transgender icon ‘Mavis and Grace’, a Thelma-and-Louise-type buddy cop Western,; ‘Sabela Gold’, a 5-season gritty gold-rush crime, and ‘Mother City’, a psycho-sexual neo-noir drama. In 2021, Gabe’...

Grace Perry is a Chicago-bred, Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared all over the internet, including on BuzzFeed, The Cut, The New Yorker, The Onion, Reductress, and much more. Her debut book. The 2000s Made Me Gay, was released on St. Martin's Press in 2021. The 2000s Made Me Gay (St. Martin's Press, 2021) is a humor-driven essay collection that interweaves queer memoir and pop culture criticism. Subjects include: how Taylor Swift's Fearless is a blueprint for U-Hauling; Seth...