Skylight Books Podcast Series

Rus Like Everyone Else (Unnamed Press) Rus is a creature of habit. His mother left him an apartment and a debit card, from which he withdraws money everyday to purchase a drink at Starbucks. Until Rus is told by a government agency that his apartment is illegal and that he owes taxes. Lots of taxes. Rus panics and his cash is stolen by a smooth talking Russian submarine captain.  Meanwhile, as Rus capitulates to the demands of society and finds an office job with the help of a micro-managing new girlfriend, the neighborhood's local postal worker surveys the lives of its other residents with an omniscient eye: Mrs. Blue compulsively steals hand creams; a secretary struggles to make conversation (much less human connections); a delivery man desperately seeks to make a name for himself but struggles with his immigrant status; and an aging bachelor, hampered by extreme paranoia, will finally have the chance to meet the Queen (if he can just hold it together long enough).  With Rus at the head of this lonely ensemble's search for meaning in a complicated and alienating world, debut novelistBette Adriaanse weaves together intersecting lives to create a mini-epic, one that charts a hidden resistance to corporate sameness and artificial relationships. Praise for Rus Like Everyone Else "This is a great book. I thought this was the freshest, most unusual writing I'd come across in years. Bette will win awards; but meanwhile continue to write and create and freak me out with her ingenuity and a voice that is unique, a gift."--Marti Leimbach, author of Dying Young and The Man From Saigon  "Bette Adriaanse has concocted a blend of Rear Window and Under Milk Wood, a world in which various inhabitants of a neighborhood are not only observed but intimately known by a girl with a blonde ponytail whose task is to deliver post. The episodes are brief, short hooks in the narrative to increase the mystery. The whole is elegant and tantalizing."--George Szirtes, T.S. Eliot Prize winning author of Reel  "In the lives of Rus and the other 'ordinary' characters around him, Bette Adriaanse has created something quite extraordinary. Drawing on the best European traditions of the fabulous and the absurd, she has invented a shimmering narrative world which is entirely her own - hallucinatory, dream-like and utterly real. Told with verve and wit, warmth and deep pathos, Rus Like Everyone Else is a highly original contemporary fable for our times: Adriaanse's is a singular new vision and voice and one we are surely going to hear more of." Jane Draycott, author of The Night Tree  "Everyday life gets a dose of unruly energy in Adriaanse's debut novel, which follows a cluster of eccentric characters throughout the neighborhood they all share. Adriaanse takes a hard look at the people we see and ignore most days--the postal workers, the secretaries, the strange old men next door--and imagines rich inner lives for them all, creating a book at once rowdy and sympathetic, an absurd panorama that somehow seems truer the stranger it gets. Rus Like Everyone Else isn't like anything else."--Benjamin Rybeck, Marketing Director at Brazos Bookstore Bette Adriaanse is a writer and a visual artist. She was born in Amsterdam in 1984. Bette graduated from the Image and Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2008 and received her M.A. in creative writing from Oxford University in 2010. She has published fiction in magazines for literature and philosophy, and she exhibits her visual work internationally. Rus Like Everyone Else is her first novel. She lives in London. Gallagher Lawson is a graduate of U.C. Riverside's Palm Desert M.F.A. program. He has worked as a travel writer and technical writer, and plays classical piano. He lives in Los Angeles. The Paper Man is his first novel. 

The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (Feminist Press) Alexandra Brodsky, editor at Feministing and co-founder of Know Your IX, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, playwright and New York Times bestselling author of My Little Red Book, bring together feminist thinkers, writers, and artists for a groundbreaking anthology that asks: what would a feminist utopia look like? The book features contributions from feminist heroes Janet Mock, Melissa Harris-Perry, Sheila Heti, Jill Soloway, and many more.  Join us for an evening with five contributors to FUP: Jill Soloway, Abigail Carney, Richard Espinoza, Cindy OK, Yumi Sakugawa, and William Schlesinger. Jill Soloway is the creator of Amazon Studios' Transparent, which won a Golden Globe for best TV series and an Emmy award for her directing in 2015. Jill won the US Dramatic Directing Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival for her first feature, Afternoon Delight. She is the author of the memoir Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, and the cofounder of Wifey.tv, a video network for women. Abigail Carney is a writer from Ohio. Her plays have been produced at the Secret Theatre, the Young Playwrights Festival, NYC Fringe, the Yale Playwrights’ Festival, the New School for Drama, and in Sitka, Alaska. Richard Espinosa is from New Jersey and is currently a student at the Yale School of Art studying graphic design. Richard is the current director of YAMP—the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, a localized narrative-based alumni-led initiative to honor the lives of the deceased students, faculty, and staff affiliated with Yale. Cindy OK is  a public high school teacher in Los Angeles. Just one year out of college, Ok teaches physics, computer science, and math to roughly two hundred students per day in seven different classes. Yumi Sakugawa is an Ignatz Award–nominated comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with Youand Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe. Her comics have also appeared in Bitch, the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, the Rumpus, the Believer, and other publications. A graduate of the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in Los Angeles. William Schlesinger completed a Fulbright fellowship in the politics of HIV/AIDS, immigration, and integration in Germany. In the future, he hopes to pursue an MD/PhD in medical anthropology to combine practicing medicine as a primary care physician while conducting ethnographic research on health inequalities.

Still Night in L.A. (Three Rooms Press) Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he’s embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town’s modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds. Praise for Still Night in L.A. “Aram Saroyan nurses the accelerator in a deceptively laconic way, channeling the faultless ratiocination of Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and Paul Cain (Seven Slayers). Still Night in L.A. keeps still until, at just the right moment, he floors it.”--Barry Gifford, author, Wild at Heart “Readers of California-dream-correction fiction may have their particular favourites -- Day of the Locust, The Slide Area, I Should Have Stayed Home, My Face for the World To See, The Long Goodbye. Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. brings long experience and practiced narrative craft to earn his place in this line.”--Tom Clark, author, The Exile of Celine “Still Night in L.A. is a novel where the magic is all in the language, in the evocation of the detective’s incongruously sweet and gentle personality, and in his astoundingly accurate takes on a world where kids have a hard time growing up before they hit middle age, and where the hard thing is not to become a movie star but to get someone to remember your name.”--Gerald Nicosia, author, Home to War: The Untold Story of the Vietnam Veterans Movement “Still Night in L.A. moves mysteriously through the late American day and ends up inscrutably in the lost hour of the early morning. In between, crazy humans reign supreme. Aram Saroyan’s prose is as elegant as emeralds and ice.”--G. A. Hausman, author, The Mythology of Horses “Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. cruises the mean streets and trendy brunch boites of Los Angeles, this city of angels and psychopaths. His shamus Michael Shepard is a Marlowe for our digital times.”--Richard Setlowe, author, The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell "A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking."--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Aram Saroyan is the author of the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage, as well as many other books of prose and poetry. His Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is featured in the documentary film One Quick Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac at Big Sur and his comments appear in the oral biographies George Being George: George Plimpton’s Life and Salinger. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, painter Gailyn Saroyan.

All Pilgrim (Four Way Books) All Pilgrim charts our vanishing into the modern landscape, mapping both the terror and the ecstatic vision of belonging to the world. Tuned to the intermingling of peril, banality, and beauty, each poem could be thought of as a way station: a site not for reverence or relief, but for seeing and pondering the dilemmas in which we find ourselves living. Restless in its search for illumination, the voice in these poems is at turns mordant, vulnerable, and rapturous—hungry for something to sing about, but unable to ignore the signs of crisis. Praise for All Pilgrims “Immanence is nothing more or less than the actual condition of things as they address the open mind and appeal to the open heart. In All Pilgrim, Stephanie Ford conducts a truly remarkable concert of immanence, noting musics I'd never thought to hear. These poems belong unmistakably to our moment. Tender to every nuance, yet undeceived, these poems are amazing.”—Donald Revell “‘To do a sly kindness and do it / without sleeping.’ The poems of All Pilgrim empty me out alongside American freeways scattered with the refuse that bedecks Stephanie Ford’s sorrowful, resolute observations. A harm has been done. The unexpected intelligence of these poems, their fractious yet layered nuances that repeatedly push the possibilities of sense against the sensual, announce a terrific and very new poetry. I honor this work and urge you, Reader, to take part.”—Cate Marvin Stephanie Ford is the author of All Pilgrim. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tin House, Harvard Review, Fence, and many other journals. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is a long-time resident of Los Angeles, where she currently teaches poetry with Writing Workshops Los Angeles. Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including the forthcoming Last Sext and Scarecrone. Poems appear in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, et al. Her first book of essays,So Sad Today, will be out in March 2016 from Grand Central. She lives in Venice, CA.

Quicksand (Simon & Schuster) A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends.  Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship. With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world--including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the "Guardian" First Book Award--Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity. Praise for Quicksand: “Steve Toltz possesses an imagination that knows no limits. His work is mordant, prophetic, and very funny. He is a true original.” —Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum “Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you almost breathless.  There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest.”—Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names “Quicksand is one of the smartest, funniest, angriest novels I have ever read. But it's also a surprisingly touching meditation on friendship and family, on art and God, on law-breaking and law enforcement. … A brilliant piece of fiction, from a novelist who so clearly sees the outsized pleasures and terrors of our troubled time.”  —Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England and The Happiest People in the World “Quicksand crackles with such intensity it made me turn the pages with a harder snap, lean closer, want to gnaw the words.  This is a novel of sneak-attack seriousness, so funny it fools you into letting down your guard—then knocks you upside the head with intense intelligence, probing thought, raw pain. For all the wit and wisdom in this book, all the pleasures contained in its raucous, furious, fearless pursuit of truths, the greatest thrill comes when it strikes you that you’ve never read anything quite like it before, that you just might have stumbled—startlingly, unsettlingly—on something close to genius in the writing of Steve Toltz.” —Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea “Steve Toltz is a verbal magician and lunatic storyteller. Every page of this novel bursts with ideas and humor and pathos and incisive riffs that perfectly express the grand absurdities of the irrational universe, along with the smaller ones of a very particular friendship. Quicksand is the work of a writer in full command of his many outsized gifts, not least of which is his humanity.”—Teddy Wayne, Whiting Award-winning author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine Steve Toltz was born in Sydney and graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. After working on Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1996, Anton Monsted went on to co-found Luhrmann’s music company, Bazmark Music, and served as Music Supervisor and Executive Music Producer on Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge! He was Executive Producer of Luhrmann’s 2004 campaign for Chanel No.5 starring Nicole Kidman, and was the Co-Producer and Executive Music Supervisor for Luhrmann’s Australia and The Great Gatsby. He is currently Senior Vice President of Music at Twentieth Century Fox, and, notably, has been Steve Toltz's friend since they met in a bowling alley in 1988. 

Brief Encounters (W.W. Norton) What anthology could unite the work of such distinct writers as Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Marvin Bell, Sven Birkerts, Meghan Daum, Stuart Dybek, Patricia Hampl, Pico Iyer, Leslie Jamison, Phillip Lopate, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Weschler?  What anthology could successfully blend literary forms as varied as memoir, aesthetic critique, political and social commentary, slice-of-life observation, conjecture, fragment, and contemplation?  What anthology could so deeply and steadily plumb the mysteries of human experience in two or three or five page bursts?  For the late Judith Kitchen, editor of such seminal anthologies as Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, "flash" nonfiction—the "short"—was an ideal tool with which to describe and interrogate our fragmented world.  Sharpened to a point, these essays sounded a resonance that owed as much to poetry as to the familiar pleasures of large-scale creative nonfiction.  Now, in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, Kitchen and her co-editor, Dinah Lenney, present nearly eighty new selections, many of which have never been published before, having been written expressly for this anthology.  Taken together, as a curated gallery of impressions and experiences, the essays in Brief Encounters exist in dialogue with each other: arguing, agreeing, contradicting, commiserating, reflecting.  Like Walt Whitman, the anthology is large and contains multitudes.  Certain themes, however, weave their way throughout the whole: the nature of family, the influence of childhood, the centrality of place, and the role of memory.  In Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "The Renaissance," for example, the author remembers her relationship with her mother, tracing her own adolescent route from intimacy to contempt.  In "The Fan," Eduardo Galeano dramatizes the communal devotions of the soccer fan.  And in "There Are Distances Between Us," Roxanne Gay considers the seemingly impossible and illogical demands of love.  What binds these and many other disparate essays together is the ways in which they enrich, color, and shade each other, the manner in which they take on new properties and dimensions when read in conjunction.  Dinah Lenney is the author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and, with Judith Kitchen, edited, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. She serves as core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and the Rainier Writing Workshop, and as the nonfiction editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Redbook, O the Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Palm Springs and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert MFA Program in Writing and the Performing Arts. Chris Daley’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, DUM DUM ZINE, and The Collagist, where “Thoughts on Time After Viewing Christian Marclay's ‘The Clock’” first appeared. She teaches academic writing at the California Institute of Technology and, as Co-Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, offers creative nonfiction workshops for students at all levels. Chris has a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center.  Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Her book of poems include Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015), and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was the 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine. Tod Goldberg is the author of a dozen books, including, most recently, Gangsterland. His nonfiction, criticism, and essays have appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Best American Essays. He lives in Indio, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside.  Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You,and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems. His latest novel, The Sleep Garden, is due out this winter from Tin House.

New Construction (Uncivilized Books) New Construction collects two newly expanded stories from cartoonist and Adventure Time contributor Sam Alden. In “Household,” a brother and sister deal with divergent memories of their father and grow closer than ever. In "Backyard," Vegans and anarchists share a house, small dramas and bizarre transformations (featuring a new, never before published ending). Designed as a companion volume for the critically acclaimed It Never Happened Again, New Construction cements Alden's reputation as one of the best cartoonists of his generation. Praise for New Construction "Alden's natural sense of framing and pace, his willingness to use silent panels to tell stories, and his beautiful (yes, beautiful) pencil images combined to open my eyes to a new idea of what a great comic can be. It helps that he's also an excellent writer--both stories sketch out lonely, lost characters efficiently, and put them each through very different quests for meaning."--Dan Kois, Slate "Two thematically divergent, but devastatingly human portraits from an emerging cartoonist displaying the sort of storytelling and artistic restraint that often only comes after years of toiling away at the drawing board. Alden is a talent to watch."--Publishers Weekly Sam Alden was born in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. He is the recipient of two Ignatz Awards, one for most promising new talent and another for best comic. Sam was an official guest at the BilBoLbul festival in Bologna, Italy. His work has been previously published in Best American Comics 2013, from Houghton-Mifflin. Sam now lives and works as an illustrator and cartoonist in Los Angeles.

The Complete Stories (New Directions) by Clarice Lispector, ed. Benjamin Moster, trans. Katrina Dodson  The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don't know what to do with themselves. Clarice Lispector's stories take us through their lives and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed. Praise for Clarice Lispector: "Clarice Lispector had a diamond-hard intelligence, a visionary instinct, and a sense of humor that veered from a naif wonder to wicked comedy."--Rachel Kushner "Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self's light."--Lorrie Moore "The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new." --Valeria Luiselli "One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century."--Colm Tobin "The elusive genius who dramatized a fractured interior world in rich, synesthetic prose."--Megan O'Grady Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fledto Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil's greatest modern writer. Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector. She lives in San Francisco and is finishing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Magdalena Edwards was born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Her thesis on Raúl Zurita's Purgatorio (1979), written while an undergraduate at Harvard, led to a stint with the “Artes & Letras” section of Chile's leading newspaper El Mercurio. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA with a dissertation titled "The Translator's Colors: Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil & Elsewhere." Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, The Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rattle, The Critical Flame, Rewire Me, and The Millions. She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband and three small children. More at magdalenaedwards.com.

Justin Chin passed away on December 24th in San Francisco. Friends of and writers influenced by his perverse, hilarious, heartbreaking and fearless poetry gather to read works by, about and for him.  Readers include: Ali Liebegott, Beth Pickens, Tara Jepsen, Michelle Tea, Myriam Gurba, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, Trebor Healey, Raquel Gutierrez and Clint Catalyst . Ali Liebegott is the author of the book-length poem The Beautifully Worthless, and the novels The IHOP Papers and Cha-Ching! She writes for the Emmy award-winning television show Transparent. She is former Managing Director of RADAR Productions, and the founder of Writers Among Artists, a San Francisco-based queer literary non-profit which supported Justin's work. Beth Pickens is the former Managing Director of RADAR Productions and oversaw Justin's time at the organization's writers' retreat and the awarding of a completion grant to Justin for his book 98 Wounds. She is a consultant to artists. Tara Jepsen is the former host of K'Vetch, a weekly queer open mic hosted in a gay male bathhouse in San Francisco, which Justin was a frequent guest at. Her debut novel, Like a Dog, is forthcoming from Sister Spit Books / City Lights. Michelle Tea is the author of the young adult books Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, the memoir How to Grow Up, and other titles. She is the founder and former Executive Director of RADAR Productions.  Myriam Gurba is the author of the story collections How Some Abuelitas Keep Their Chicana Granddaughters Still While Painting Their Portraits in Winter and Dahlia Season; the poetry collection Wish You Were Me and many self-published zines and chapbooks.  Ryka Aoki de la Cruz is the author of the award-winning poetry chapbook Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shinesand the full-length volume Seasonal Velocities. She is a professor of English at Santa Monica College and of Queer Studies at Antioch University. Trebor Healey is the author of A Horse Named Sorrow, Through it Came Bright Colors, Faun, and other works. He has received award from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Publishing Triangle and the Violet Quill. Raquel Gutierrez is the author of the chapbooks Running in Place: poems about INSTITUTIONALITY, #whiteboo andBreaking Up with Los Angeles. She has long been a writer and live performer, and is the publisher of Econo Textual Objects. Clint Catalyst is the author of Cottonmouth Kisses and the co-editor of Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person. He is a writer, actor, spoken word performer and stylist. Irene Suico Soriano is a Filipina American poet, Film & Literary Independent Curator and shelter animal advocate that focuses on geriatric and terminally ill animals that enter the LA city and county shelter system. She lives in Silver Lake with her three rescued dogs Cadi, Maxon & Papoo and wishes they could have met Justin even just once.

Burn (Greenwillow Books) After helping to rescue Princess Aislynn, Elanor has finally rejoined the rebel camp she calls home. Stolen from her parents at a young age and forced into service by the Wicked Queen, Elanor now wants nothing more than to see the queen removed from power. But Elanor has secrets, mistakes she’s spent years trying to forget, and the closer the rebels get to the throne, the harder it is for Elanor to keep her past hidden away. With fellow rebels on her side—including Princess Aislynn, Thackery, and the handsome and mysterious Matthias—it is time for Elanor to make a decision. Will she protect her secrets? Or risk everything to save the people she loves? Burn is the thrilling companion to Elissa Sussman’s masterful and original fairy tale, Stray, that will appeal to readers of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and fans of Wicked, Into the Woods, and the Disney princess movies. Elissa Sussman received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and in a previous life managed animators and organized spreadsheets at some of the best animation studios in the world, including Nickelodeon, Disney, DreamWorks, and Sony Imageworks. You can find her name in the credits of The Croods, Hotel Transylvania, The Princess and the Frog, andTangled. She lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend and their rescue dog, Basil. Sarah Enni is an author, journalist, and founder of the First Draft podcast. She's the palest girl in Los Angeles.