South Central Noir

About the Contributors

Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay — winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award — and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor. Cha is the current series editor of The Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology. She lives in Los Angeles.

Nikolas Charles writes about heroes, thugs, and firebugs. Before devoting his time to writing crime fiction, he was a music journalist and photographer. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, Playboy, People, Life, and US Weekly. He was embedded in the Los Angeles Fire Department at Station 33 in South Central. He’s currently contributing to Time magazine and writing noir stories. Follow him on Instagram: @nikolascharlesauthor.

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award — winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She has published several books including the novels My Soul to Keep and The Good House, and the collection Ghost Summer: Stories. She was an executive producer on Shudder’s Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and husband Steven Barnes cowrote an episode of The Twilight Zone for Jordan Peele and two segments in Shudder’s Horror Noire anthology film.

Larry Fondation is the author of six books of fiction, primarily set in the Los Angeles inner city, where he works as a community organizer. Three of his books are illustrated by London-based artist Kate Ruth. He has received a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. In French translation, he was nominated for Le Prix SNCF du Polar. His work in progress is called Single Room Occupancy, set on the fringe of Skid Row.

Gar Anthony Haywood is the Shamus and Anthony award — winning author of twelve crime novels, including the Aaron Gunner private eye series and the Joe and Dottie Loudermilk mysteries. His short fiction has been included in The Best American Mystery Stories anthologies and Booklist has called him “a writer who has always belonged in the upper echelon of American crime fiction.” Haywood’s spiritual thriller, In Things Unseen, was published by Slant Books in 2020.

Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award — winning author of traditional mystery series and noir short stories. Her first historical mystery, Clark and Division, follows the release of a Japanese American family from a World War II detention center. The seventh and final installment of her Mas Arai series, Hiroshima Boy, was published in Japan on August ٦, ٢٠٢١. Currently living in her birthplace, Pasadena, California, she was an editor of the Rafu Shimpo newspaper.

Emory Holmes II is a Los Angeles — based journalist and short story writer. His reporting has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Sentinel, and other publications. His short stories have appeared in The Cocaine Chronicles, The Best American Mystery Stories 2006, Los Angeles Noir, and 44 Caliber Funk.

Roberto Lovato, a journalist and teacher, is the award-winning author of Unforgetting, a memoir picked by the New York Times as an Editors’ Choice. He is also the recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center. His essays and reports from around the world have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, and other national and international publications.

Penny Mickelbury is the author of twelve mystery novels in three different series, two novels of historical fiction, and a collection of short stories. She has also contributed short stories to several anthologies. Her first career was as a journalist, and in 2020 she was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. The Atlanta native lives in Los Angeles.

Gary Phillips has published novels, comics, and short stories, and edited numerous anthologies. Violent Spring, first published in 1994, was named one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. Culprits, a linked anthology he coedited, has been optioned as a British miniseries, and he was a staff writer on FX’s Snowfall about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.

Eric Stone is the author of the Ray Sharp series of detective thrillers set in Asia and based on stories he covered during many years of working as a journalist. He also wrote Wrong Side of the Wall, a biography of Ralph “Blackie” Schwamb, the greatest prison baseball player of all time, for which he took a very deep dive into the history and culture of Central Avenue in South Central Los Angeles during the 1940s.

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans, raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in creative writing from UC, Irvine. He is the author of six books including Understand This, for which he won the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the executive director of Literature for Life, an educational advocacy organization, and creative director of the Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef.

Jeri Westerson, an LA native, writes the acclaimed Crispin Guest medieval noir series, two urban fantasy series, and a gaslamp fantasy-steampunk series. Her medieval mysteries have garnered thirteen award nominations, from the Agatha to the Shamus. Westerson has served as president of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, and president and VP of Sisters in Crime Orange County and Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles.

Désirée Zamorano, a native of Los Angeles, is the author of the highly acclaimed literary novel The Amado Women. An award-winning and Pushcart Prize — nominated short story writer, her work is often an exploration of issues of invisibility, injustice, and inequity. A selection of her writing can be found in publications from Akashic Books, Catapult, and Pen + Brush, and in Cultural Weekly and the Kenyon Review. She is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.