Speakers & Workshops

Meet our guests

Published authors and working writers join us for the day to share their craft, lead workshops, and talk about the writing life.

• Hayley Diep

  Picture-book author

  Hayley Diep writes and teaches in the Bay Area. She is the author of the picture books If You Give a Girl a Bike and Rising Above: The Wataru “Wat” Misaka Story (Triumph Books, 2023). When she isn’t writing or reading, she can be found running around outdoors with her family — and, now and then, stuck in or falling out of a tree.

  

• Christopher Blackman

  Poet

  Christopher Blackman is a poet from Columbus, Ohio, who now lives outside Boston. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. His collection Three-Day Weekend won Gunpowder Press’s Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize, was published in 2024, and was longlisted for the 2025 Massachusetts Book Awards.

  

• Marcos Damián León

  Writer and professor of English

  Marcos Damián León is a writer from the Salinas Valley. He is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches and researches Latine and Indigenous literature. He holds an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech University, where he was a Mellon Crossing Latinidades Fellow and a managing editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. His writing has appeared in Taco Bell Quarterly and the anthology A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories, and is forthcoming in Passages North. He is at work on a gothic horror novel about farmworker exploitation.

  

• Emily King

  Poet and English teacher

  Emily King is a poet and an English teacher at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, where she teaches Creative Writing and Science Fiction. Her poem “Waltz at Dusk” won the Grand Prize in the 2025 San Francisco Writers Conference Writing Contest, where her entry Monarch was also a finalist in the Children’s and Young Adult category. She holds an MA in English from Loyola Marymount University. She discovered her love of literature in a high school classroom, and she helps her students find their own voice on the page.