ZYZZYVA ISSUE NO. 106 LAUNCH EVENT

Please welcome ZYZZYVA's Southern California All-Stars!

Though a San Francisco publication, ZYZZYVA has championed writers, poets, and artists from the Southland since its founding in 1985. Come hear recent contributors Lou Mathews, Melissa Yancy, Jim Gavin, David Hernandez, and special guest Dana Johnson read from their work, and find out whyZYZZYVA is considered one of the country's finest literary journals. Emceed by ZYZZYVA Contributing Editor David L. Ulin.

Issue No. 106 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art.

Jim Gavin is the author of Middle Men, published by Simon & Schuster. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope,Esquire, The Mississippi Review, and ZYZZYVA.

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark forthcoming from Counterpoint in August 2016. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Callaloo, and the Iowa Review, among others. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

David Hernadez's most recent book of poetry is Dear, Sincerely. His other collections include Hoodwinked, Always Danger and A House Waiting for Music. He has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Best American Poetry. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel Ear to the Ground, written with Paul Kolsby. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, his other books includeSidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time; and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.

Melissa Yancy is the recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature Fellowship, and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press for her short fiction collection Dog Years, which will be published in late 2016. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, One Story,Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and works as a fundraiser for health care causes.

Lou Mathews has received a Pushcart Prize, a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Commission fellowships in fiction. His stories have been published in Black Clock, Tin House, New England Review, 40+ other literary magazines, ten fiction anthologies and several textbooks. His first novel, L.A. Breakdown was an L.A. Times Best book. This is his first appearance in ZYZZYVA.