Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir

N EAL P OLLACK’Smemoir, Alternadad , was published by Pantheon in early 2007. The editor of Chicago Noir, Pollack lives in Los Angeles with his family. His website and blog, www.nealpollack.com, are generally informative and amusing.

C HRISTOPHER R ICEis the New York Times best-selling author of three novels, mostly recently Light Before Day. A Lambda Literary Award-winner, he is also a regular columnist for the Advocate and is currently a visiting faculty member at the graduate writing program of Otis College of Art and Design. He lives in West Hollywood. For more information, visit www.christopherricebooks.com.

B RIAN A SCALON R OLEY, a Los Angeles native, is the author of the novel American Son , which received the 2003 Association of Asian American Studies Prose Book Award. It was a New York Times Notable Book, one of the Los Angeles Times’ Best Books of the Year, and a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. More information can be found at www.brianroley.com.

L IENNA S ILVERwas born in Russia, and immigrated to the United States before Perestroyka came to the rescue. In Los Angeles, she began translating plays and screenplays, and cowrote a project for British Screen International. Her short stories have received numerous honorary awards, and she is working on a novel about contemporary Russia.

S USAN S TRAIGHTwas born in Riverside, where she still lives with her family. She has published six novels. Her latest, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon, 2006), set during slavery, is the first of a trilogy about the characters who appear in “The Golden Gopher.”

H ÉCTOR T OBARis the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the author of Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier . Born in L.A., he has been editor of the bilingual San Francisco newspaper El Tecolote and features editor at the LA Weekly , and he has written for the New Yorker , the Nation, and other publications. He now reports for the Los Angeles Times from Mexico City, and is married with three children.

D IANA W AGMANis the author of three novels and the film Delivering Milo . She is the recipient of the 2001 PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction. She teaches in the film department at California State University, Long Beach.