The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is coming to Los Angeles for the AWP Conference (March 30 – April 2, 2016)!  Last year’s AWP was a success with our bookfair table and reading at Boneshaker Books.  This year, you’ll be able to find us at Table 1157 and find information regarding our upcoming Spring in Newport, Rhode Island (April 22-25, 2016) , Summer in Narbonne & Barcelona (July 18-26, 2016), and Summer in Granada, Spain (July  28-August 5, 2016) Writing Retreats.

We’ll also be hosting our AWP Reading at Sabor y Cultura (located at 5625 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028) on Friday, April 1, 2016 from 4-7 pm.  Featured Readers include Rita Banerjee, Jess Burnquist, Julialicia Case, Ariana Kelly, Gwen E. Kirby, Katie Knoll, Ellaraine Lockie, Ondrej Pazdirek, Heather Aimee O’Neill, Brenda Peynado, Esther Pfaff, Jessica Piazza, Jonathan Shapiro, Emily Skaja, and Emily Smith.

Featured AWP Writers:

Rita Banerjee received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, Poets for Living Waters, The Monarch Review, The Fiction Project, Quail Bell Magazine, Jaggery, Catamaran, The Crab Creek Review, The Dudley Review, Objet d’Art, Amethyst Arsenic, Vox Populi, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, Chrysanthemum, and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.  Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night, was published by Finishing Line Press and received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali, is forthcoming from Spider Road Press in 2016.  Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she is currently working on a novel and a book of lyric essays.

Jess Burnquist was raised in Tempe, Arizona. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Salon, GOOD Magazine, The Washington Post, Time.com, NPR.org, Jezebel, Persona, Education Week, Good Housekeeping and various online and print journals. She is a recipient of the Joan Frazier Memorial Award for the Arts at ASU. Jess currently teaches high school in San Tan Valley, and has been honored with a Sylvan Silver Apple Award. She resides in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area with her husband, son, daughter and three-legged dog, Skipper.

Julialicia Case’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Crazyhorse, Willow Springs, Witness, Water-Stone Review, The Pinch, Quarterly West, Confrontation, and other journals. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, a University of New Orleans Writing Award for Study Abroad, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She graduated from the master’s program in creative writing at the University of California, Davis, and is currently studying in the PhD program in fiction at the University of Cincinnati.

Ariana Kelly earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Washington. In September of 2015 Bloomsbury published her first book Phone Booth, a cultural history of phone booths and communication, as part of their Object Lessons series. She has essays, poems and reviews out or forthcoming from The Atlantic, Salon, LA Review of Books, The Awl, The Toast, The Bellingham Review, Salt Hill, and Poetry Northwest, among many other journals. She is currently working on a couple of books, one a collection of essays dealing with health, place and subjectivity, and another about running. Additionally, she is working on a series of erasure poems based on the Wallpaper travel guides published by Phaidon.

Gwen E. Kirby is a native San Diegian. She left her sunny home state to get her BA at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, and Midwestern Gothic and have been finalists for the Zoetrope: All Story, Indiana Review, and Narrative fiction competitions. She is a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ and Sewanee Young Writers’ Conferences.

Katie Knoll received a BA from Florida State University and is currently a MA student of fiction at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Nimrod, Rattle, Baltimore Review, and Exit 7, among others. Her poetry and prose have been featured as one of Narrative’s 2013 Top 5 Stories of the Year and awarded the George M. Harper Prize for fiction and the Jean Chimsky Poetry Prize.

Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded author of poetry, nonfiction books and essays.  Her chapbook, Where the  Meadowlark Sings, won the 2014 Encircle Publication’s Chapbook Contest. Her newest collection, Love Me Tender in Midlife, has been released as an internal chapbook, in IDES from Silver Birch Press.  Other recent work has received the Women’s National Book Association’s Poetry Prize, Best Individual Collection from Purple Patch magazine in England for Stroking David’s Leg, the San Gabriel Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest win for Red for the Funeral and The Aurorean’s Chapbook Spring Pick for Wild as in Familiar. Ellaraine teaches poetry workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh. She is currently judging the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contests for Winning Writers.

Ondrej Pazdirek grew up in Prague, Czech Republic and moved to the U.S. at the age of 17. He holds a B.A. degree in English from Florida State University and is currently in his last semester as an M.A. in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati. He is the recipient of the John McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award for 2013. He spent the last summer back in Prague as a Taft Graduate Summer Fellow, completing his first book-length manuscript, which is currently undergoing revisions. Ondrej also translates from Czech into English and his translations of Kamil Bouška have recently been published in B O D Y. His own poems have appeared in Bayou Magazine, Radar Poetry and Euphony, among others.

Heather Aimee O’Neill teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent collection of poetry, Obliterations, is co-authored with Jessica Piazza and forthcoming by Red Hen Press. A Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow, her poetry chapbook, Memory Future, won the University of Southern California’s Gold Line Press Award, chosen by judge Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California. Her work has been shortlisted for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Award and has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is a freelance writer for publications such as Time Out New York, Parents Magazine and Salon.com. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner and two sons.

Brenda Peynado’s stories have been selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 and received prizes from the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, Writers at Work, and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Epoch, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and others. She received her MFA from Florida State University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

Esther Pfaff is a Munich based fiction-writer focusing on contemporary stories on personal development and family psychology.   Her current projects involve a short story collection and a novel. In daily life, she divides her time between her job as an IP lawyer and her home-based writing studio. Esther is a member of the Cambridge Writers Workshop since 2015 and was a student at a Master Class by Julia Cho, Hedgebrook (Seattle) December 5 to 14, 2015.

Jessica Piazza is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Interrobang (Red Hen Press) and the chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press). Her third collection, Obliterations (co-written with Heather Aimee O’Neill), is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Jessica curates the Poetry Has Value blog, where she and others explore the intersection of poetry, money and worth. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she teaches Writing & Rhetoric. She co-founded Bat City Review in Austin, TX, Gold Line Press in Los Angeles, CA and is currently the poetry editor for the Southern Pacific Review. Learn more at www.poetryhasvalue.com, or follow her on Twitter @JessWins.


Jonathan Shapiro received MFAs from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Washington where he was a Klepser fellow. His poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Sow’s Ear, Cranky, Erg, The Laurel Review, The Seattle Review, and more. Jonathan’s manuscript was a finalist in the John Ciardi Poetry Prize for first books.

Emily Skaja grew up next to a cemetery in northern Illinois. She holds degrees in Creative Writing from Millikin University (BA), Temple University (MA),
and Purdue University (MFA). During her MFA, she was the Poetry Co-Editor of Sycamore Review. Emily’s poems have been published by or are forthcoming from Best New Poets 2015, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Devil’s Lake, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Journal, jubilat, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, PANK, The Pinch, Pleiades, Poets.org, Southern Indiana Review, and Vinyl. Emily was the winner of the 2015 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize for her poem “My History As.” Her poems have been shortlisted for the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the BoothPoetry Prize, the Sonora Review Poetry Prize, and the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, for which her work was selected as the runner-up. In 2015, Emily was the winner of The Russell Prize for emerging poets, an Academy of American Poets College Prize, and an AWP Intro Award. In the summer of 2015, Emily taught classes in poetry at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Currently, she lives in Ohio, where she is a PhD student in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

Emily Smith is a Managing Editing and Communications Intern for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Sarasota, Florida, she currently attends school at the New Hampshire Institute of Art where she studies Creative Writing and Art History. She writes for The Ploughshares Blog, Opposing Views, Highbrow Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Walleyed Press, Essence Poetry, and Ayris.

**  How to get to Sabor y Cultura:

If you are driving to the event from the Los Angeles Convention Center, you can access Sabor y Cultura by taking US-101 N to N Wilton Place. From there, take exit 8A from US-101 N. Then continue onto N Wilton Place and drive to Hollywood Boulevard. Or, you can take Georgia St to W Olympic Boulevard. Then follow W Olympic Blvd, S Alvarado St and US-101 N to Hollywood Blvd.

If you are planning on taking public transportation, you can access Sabor Y Cultura by walking approximately four minutes from the convention center to the PicoStation where you will take the Metro Blue Line (801) two stops to 7th Street / Metro CenterStation. From the 7th Street / Metro Center Station, walk approximately one minute to the Metro Red Line (802). Take the Metro Red Line (802) heading towards North Hollywood Station ten stops to the Hollywood/Western Station. From there, it is a four minute walk via Hollywood Boulevard to Sabor Y Cultura.