Moderators

A proud public educator, Judy Viertel was named San Francisco Teacher of the Year in 2014. However, she can’t seem to stay away from fiction. She’s been published in Gargoyle Magazine, Gold Dust Magazine, Read Short Fiction, Mad Swirl, and others. One of her stories will appear in the soon-to-be-published anthology More Nuggets from Gold Dust. Read Judy’s work online: The Gods Watched at Identity Theory; Judy’s travels among the Mayan people of the Yucatan

Monya Baker commissions and edits opinion articles for Nature magazine. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, Slate, Wired, and elsewhere. Her novel-in-progress, THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE JOY, won first place at the 2021 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. Four books of Olga’s short fiction appeared in Russia. Olga serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about post-Soviet and diaspora literature.

Bio for Kurt Wallace Martin to come.

Moderators Emeriti

Tamim Ansary ran the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 22 years. He is the author of The Invention of Yesterday, Destiny Disrupted and Games without Rules, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.

James Warner’s short stories have appeared most recently in Best of British Science Fiction 2018, The Best of British Fantasy 2018, Santa Monica Review, Georgia Review, EPOCH, and Ninth Letter. He also organizes the reading series InsideStorytime, and is the author of All Her Father’s Guns, a novel from a time when U.S. politics was still satirizable.

Robin Bullard once drove in a demolition derby and came in fifth. Robin Bullard is trying to write a novel. Robin Bullard hitch-hiked across America four times. Robin Bullard ushers tourists to the best selfie locations. While in Paris, Robin Bullard worked as a laborer. Robin Bullard’s book of short stories, I Came by Cab, can be found on Amazon.com.