Liza Monroy is the author of the novel Mexican High, the memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took to Keep My Best Friend in America and What It Taught Us About Love, and Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon to Be on Fire. She has written for the New York Times, O, Marie Claire, and the Los Angeles Times. Monroy currently teaches in the writing program at UC Santa Cruz.
Maceo Montoya has published three works of fiction — The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, You Must Fight Them — and Letters to the Poet from His Brother. His most recent publication is Chicano Movement for Beginners, a work of graphic nonfiction. Montoya is an associate professor in Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. He is also an affiliated faculty member of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community-based art center in Woodland, California.
Tommy Moore graduated from UC Santa Cruz working in film and video production. In 2013, he was one of six writers selected for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship. He and his wife Amie recently welcomed their first child, Charles Joseph. They live in Malibu and Moore is currently writing a collection of short stories. “Buck Low” is his first published story.
Micah Perks is the author of We Are Gathered Here, What Becomes Us, Pagan Time, and Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter, and Me. The Guardian rated What Becomes Us one of the top ten apocalyptic novels. Her short story collection True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape will be published in October 2018. She has lived in Santa Cruz for twenty years.
Lee Quarnstrom, author of When I Was a Dynamiter! Or, How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer, and a Bridegroom Seven Times, lives with his wife, poet Christine Quarnstrom, in Southern California. He was a legendary newspaper reporter in Santa Cruz for more than thirty years.
Peggy Townsend is an award-winning journalist who has written on everything from serial killers to county fairs. She divides her time between Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe. Her new mystery novel is See Her Run.
Jill Wolfson is the author of four young adult novels. Her story in this collection stems from her decades as a writing teacher for incarcerated teens and from her son’s stint working for a local donut shop. She is a Santa Cruz — based writer whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Sun magazine and on the radio show This American Life.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the talent and camaraderie of the Santa Cruz Noir writers, I have critical friends and artists to acknowledge. First, the out-of-town pros: fellow noir author and editor extraordinaire Ariel Gore and Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple.
My appreciation and thanks to: Kat Bailey, Joe Mancino, Tristan Miley-Medina, Jennifer Taillac Gustafson, Shmuel Thaler, Carter Wilson, Don Wallace, the UCSC Creative Writing Program, Bookshop Santa Cruz — let’s do a sequel. Thank you to my family, Jon and Aretha, who know every crevice of Santa Cruz better than I do. And, always by my side, my late father Bill Bright and his poet friends William Everson and Gary Snyder, for my earliest Santa Cruz memories and precontact inspirations.
— S.B.