Jamie Ford is an American writer of two internationally best-selling books. Ford is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best “Adult Fiction” book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. The book was also named the #1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association. In 2013, he released his second book, Songs of Willow Frost.

His stories have also been included in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, and The End is Nigh, part of the The Apocalypse Triptych, a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey.

Mat Johnson is a novelist who sometimes writes other things.

He is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Mat Johnson is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Marie was born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and American father, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her first novel,Picking Bones from Ash, was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a finalist for the Paterson Prize. She has written for The New York Times, Salon, National Geographic, Glamour, and other publications and has been a guest on Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered on NPR.

In 2013, Marie was awarded a Fellowship by the NEA and Japan US Friendship Commission, which enabled her to live in Japan. While there, she was featured in the NHK (Japanese National Broadcasting) Documentary, Venerating the Departed, which was broadcast internationally several times.

James Tyner is a published poet, an organizer of poetry readings, and the first ever poet laureate of Fresno California.  The panel would be about poets of mixed race/ethnicity.  Their experiences with writing, reading, and teaching poetry.

Michelle Brittan has had poems published in Calyx, Crab Creek Review,The Grove Review, The Los Angeles Review, Nimrod, Pilgrimage, and Poet Lore, and in the anthology, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25.  In 2011, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize.  Born in San Francisco, Michelle now lives in Long Beach and is a doctoral fellow in University of Southern California’s PhD program in Creative Writing & Literature.

A former student of California’s Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, his poetry has graced stages in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. He founded the Inner Ear as a way to free poetry from the confines of academic institutions, making it accessible to all. Bryan has been awarded two City of Fresno Commendations for contributions to Fresno’s rich artistic and cultural heritage and has been featured as one of the four “Fresno Poets” from writer Nick Belardes’s Distinguished Valley Writers series as well as appeared in journals such as Poetry, Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, In The Gove, The San Joaquin Review, Jubilee, and Invisible Memoirs and was an Honorable Mention in the ‘06 Larry Levis Poetry Prize. He is a recent graduate of Fresno Pacific University and plans to teach Special Education.