Eating My One-Year-Old's Leftover Smash Cake​ | Essay 

"​​Months later, this same OB delivered my perfectly healthy daughter after 57 hours of labor. She threatened to cut me open 3 hours into pushing if it took me longer than one more. She called in the NICU, whispered to the attending nurses “probably shoulder dystocia,” and used a vacuum that planted a purple and black bruise on my daughter’s head, like an open dying flower."

Dear Sarah | Essay

"The carefully planned life I had laid out for myself dissipated. When I walked amongst crowds I was keenly aware of the freedom I was about to lose and was instantly ashamed of my own selfishness. Strangers held my gaze, their eyes traveled down and lingered. A beautiful woman with big sunglasses and sleek hair carried her child by the hand and held her coffee in the other. She looked at me with a judgment that could only have come from my own insecurities."

Today My Abuelitos Have Been Married Fifty Years ​| Short Story 

"At the reception my Abuelito gets mariachis. For my dear one, he says. A teenage cousin brings a güero because last time her Ma said why don’t you date Chicanos. My older cousin has a new baby, and my Abuelita won’t speak to her because she isn’t married to her man. She wears the baby against the skin on her chest wrapped in a pouch. I curl my finger under the stretchy fabric."

Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

​By Kim Brooks

"It’s the buzz beneath our skin that propels us forward when we leave our child playing out of our sight for a moment. It’s the instinct to feed ourselves a hundred worst-case scenarios that are statistically impossible. It’s the scandalized looks when we’re in public that compel us to parent a little harsher for the benefit of bystanders. We are afraid of what others will think of us, we are afraid we’ve made the wrong choices, and we are afraid that we are not enough."

Things You Won't Tell Your Therapist

By Colleen Kearney Rich

"Every subtle exchange reveals all of the things we can’t tell each other, out of fear or shame. “I can’t tell her about the asteroid and the little red-haired girl. I can’t say anything at all. I spend the rest of the class in the bathroom holding cold paper towels over my eyes,” the young narrator in “End of Days” confides, weighed down by her father’s obsession with the end of the world. The sorrow in these pieces lies in what the reader knows as truth: If we merely spoke our anxieties, we would begin to realize we aren’t so alone."

Tyler Dilts 

"His chilling and sometimes terrifying novels explore the complex and haunted characters of the Long Beach homicide department and the murders they solve. Dilts’ Long Beach Homicide series has gained quite a following amongst crime fiction fans, Long Beach natives, and many others. “Someone told me to set a couple of long-term goals, for motivation,” Says Tyler Dilts. “So I set some goals that I thought would be impossible to reach,” he told me when we met in L.A. to discuss his upcoming novel. “I thought, I’m going to sell a quarter of a million books, and I’m going to get nominated for an Edgar award. And in the last year, I’ve realized those goals weren’t as unrealistic as I thought.”"

Michele Filgate

"What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is a composition of real motherhood, from the hilarious moments to the painful. It is an exploration into the imperfect women who make up this unique part of humanity. André Aciman writes of his relationship with his deaf mother in “Are You Listening.” Lynn Steger Strong reflects on the impossible expectations we put on our mothers, the ones they can never live up to, in “The Same Story About My Mother.” Alexander Chee attempts to shield his mother from the sexual abuse he suffered as a child in “Xanadu.”"

Rene Denfeld

"Denfeld has written a tense, page-turning, crime novel that leaves readers feeling connected to her characters and their stories in an intimate way. Naomi and Celia dig through their haunted pasts, even while they uncover the truth of the present. The Butterfly Girl is a book that lingers, alive with hope as much as it is streaked in sorrow. Denfeld and I spoke about the importance of how we fictionalize trauma, the way she discovers her stories, and the beautiful and inspiring life she has led that motivates her writing."