Sophie Stava received her BA in English literature from UC Santa Barbara. She currently resides in Southern California with her family. COUNT MY LIES is her debut novel.

A read-in-one-night psychological thriller narrated by a compulsive liar whose little white lies allow her to enter into the life of a wealthy couple who are harboring much darker secrets themselves.

You can pre-order her book today at https://www.sophiestava.com.

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of four books of poems: In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Gunpowder Press, September 2024); Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire.

He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020) and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman in New York City.

He was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. In April 2025, he became the first California Poet Laureate to be officially reappointed to a second two-year term.

Read about Our California, Lee’s first term CAPL statewide project. Read the full press release from the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom here.

Bio:

Lisa Alvarez’s poetry and prose have appeared widely including About Place Journal, Air/Light, Citric Acid, Huizache, Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica Review, and in anthologies such as Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton) and most recently, Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond (Gunpowder Press). For 33 years she has been a professor of English at Irvine Valley College, where she co-directs the PUENTE program. In the summers, she co-directs the writers workshops at the Community of Writers in California's High Sierra. Her debut collection, _Some Final Beauty and other Stories, _was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste imprint which promotes Latinx writers of the American West.

Link to website: https://www.lisaalvarez.com/