Oakland Noir

About the Contributors

Kim Addonizio, an acclaimed writer of poetry and prose, is a Pushcart Prize winner, a National Book Award finalist for Tell Me, and a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her works include Jimmy & Rita, What Is This Thing Called Love, Lucifer at the Starlite, Little Beauties, My Dreams Out in the Street, and The Palace of Illusions. Her new books are a collection of poems, Mortal Trash, and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress.

Carolyn Alexander is a writer, storyteller, English teacher, and librarian. She revels in the use of the English language, and has written original material for single and tag-team storytelling performances as well as for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She has a BA in English from Cornell University and a master’s in library science from Columbia University.

Phil Canalin is a twenty-five-year public health finance manager in Oakland, most recently for the noted Health Care for the Homeless program. He loves writing fiction, poetry, and children’s stories, and currently resides in Alameda with Sue, his wife of thirty-six years. His latest publication is Invisible Society Fables, short stories based on his experience with homeless people and their caregivers. For more information visit www.philcanalin.com.

Jamie DeWolf is a performer, film director, and showman from Oakland. He is a National Slam Poetry Champion, NPR’s “Performer of the Year,” and has toured everywhere from Moscow to San Quentin State Prison. DeWolf is the writer and codirector of the feature film Smoked, and the host and creator of Tourettes without Regrets, the longest-running monthly underground variety show in Oakland. Watch his films and performances at www.jamiedewolf.com.

Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and college professor. She now teaches printmaking classes and runs the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging relationships between queer artists and their ancestors. Her illustrated noir, Blackmail, My Love, is set in San Francisco in the dark ages of queerdom: 1951. Winner of Lambda and Indiefab Gold awards, the narrative is a revelatory history of San Francisco’s sexually complex underground.

Judy Juanita’s debut novel, Virgin Soul, follows a black teen who becomes a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Her short stories and poems have appeared widely and her plays have been produced in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York City. De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland traces her development as a writer, activist, and independent woman.

Dorothy Lazard manages the Oakland History Room, a special reference collection in the Oakland Public Library. She holds a master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore. Her writing has appeared in The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson, Essence magazine, and the librarian blog The Desk Set.

Joe Loya is the author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber, and is the host of The Allure of Crime podcast. He homeschools his daughter, but has not initiated her in the art of banditry. Yet.

Thomas McElravey was born in Tahoe City, California, in 1991. He moved to the Bay Area in 2009 to pursue writing and music. He has contributed to several local zines, all of which have disappeared into the region’s remarkable creative commons. His contribution to this collection, “Black and Borax,” is his first published short story. He currently lives in Oakland with his two cats, Serenity and Ichibad.

Eddie Muller, a.k.a. the “Czar of Noir,” is a writer, cinema historian, and film preservationist. He has been nominated for several Edgar and Anthony awards, and his novel The Distance won a Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel; Muller is also the coauthor of the New York Times best-selling autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star. He produces San Francisco’s Noir City, the largest annual film noir retrospective in the world, and is a regular host on Turner Classic Movies.

Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the International Dublin IMPAC Award. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Asia and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Award. The New York Times called the novel “incandescent.” Her second novel, What Lies Between Us, was picked as one of Buzzfeed’s twenty-seven most exciting new books of 2016. She lives in the Temescal area of Oakland.

Keenan Norris’s novel Brother and the Dancer won the James D. Houston Award in 2012. His work has appeared in Popmatters, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Inlandia: A Literary Journal, and the anthology Post-Soul Satire. Keenan edited Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape and is a guest editor for the Oxford African American Studies Center. He teaches at Evergreen Valley College and Goddard College’s West Coast campus and serves on the editorial board for the Los Angeles literary collective Literature for Life.

Nick Petrulakis has been a bookseller in the Bay Area for almost twenty years. His writing has appeared in various publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland magazine. His cocktail creations, marrying fiction and spirits, can be found at drinkswithnick.com.

Mahmud Rahman’s walk around Lake Merritt during a vacation compelled a move across the continent. Besides Oakland, his long-term hometowns have included Detroit and Dhaka. He currently works in Oakland and received an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. He is the author of the short story collection Killing the Water and the translator of Bangladeshi writer Mahmudul Haque’s novel Black Ice.

Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder is a visual artist and writer based in Oakland. A fan of all things odd, experimental, or transgressive, Schroeder creates artist books and dark short fiction. After earning an MFA in book art and creative writing from Mills College in 2015, Schroeder now works for Flying Fish Press, an independent publisher of limited-edition artists’ books, and teaches book art workshops and classes.

Jerry Thompson is an accomplished violinist, playwright, and poet. His works have appeared in Zyzzyva, James White Review, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing. He is the coauthor of Black Artists in Oakland. Thompson owned Black Spring Books, an independent bookstore, and is the creator and organizer of the original Sister Circle Reading Series. He is currently working on a play about the prison system, a memoir, and a poetry collection.

Harry Louis Williams II was born in New York City and raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He is an ordained Baptist minister who is known for writing gangster fiction such as the award-winning best seller Straight Outta East Oakland. In 2015, the Oakland city council recognized Williams for his work reclaiming the lives of young people lost to the streets. Dr. Cornel West calls his book Street Cred: A Hood Minister’s Guide to Urban Ministry a “must read.”