University of California, Riverside

Stephen Paul Breen is a nationally syndicated cartoonist. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and 2009. He graduated from Huntington Beach High... School in 1988 and attended the University of California, Riverside, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science. It was at UCR that he started drawing editorial cartoons for his school paper, The Highlander. In 1991, Steve won the Scripps Howard Charles M. Schulz Award as the top college cartoonist and the John Locher award for Outstanding College Editorial Cartoonist. He was influenced by cartoonists such as Jeff MacNelly, Paul Conrad, Pat Oliphant and Don Wright. Breen was about to become a high school history teacher when the Asbury Park Press offered him a job in the art department in July 1994. He became the full-time editorial cartoonist there in 1996. In July 2001, he returned to his home state to join the staff of The San Diego Union-Tribune. His editorial cartoons are nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate, who acquired former syndicate Copley News Service in 2008. They regularly appear in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek and US News and World Report.
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Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's... books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Black Blossoms . Born in Bakersfield, California on July 18, 1970, and raised in Michoacán, Mexico, he is the son and grandson of migrant farmworkers, both parents now deceased. His extended family migrated back to California in 1980 and returned to Mexico in 1992. González remained alone in the U.S. to complete his education. Details of his troubled childhood in Michoacán and his difficult adolescence as an immigrant in California are the basis for his coming of age memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa. During his college years he also performed with various Baile Folklorico and Flamenco dance troupes. He earned a B.A. in Humanities and Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and graduate degrees from the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University in Tempe. His former teachers include the Chicano poets Gary Soto, Francisco X.
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Deborah Digges was an American poet and teacher. She was born Deborah Leah Sugarbaker in Jefferson City, Missouri, on February 6, 1950. Her father... was a physican and her mother was a nurse; she was the sixth child in a family of ten children. Digges received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California-Riverside in 1976, a Masters from the University of Missouri in 1982, and her M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1984. In the course of her academic career, she taught in the writing and English faculties of New York University, Boston University, Columbia University, and Tufts University. She authored four books of poetry and two memoirs. Her first book of poems, Vesper Sparrows, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize for Poetry. In 1997 Digges was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the largest prize for a single work of poetry, for her book Rough Music. She was also the winner of two Pushcart Prizes. Digges translated the poems of the Cuban poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela. A book of poetry, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems, was published by Knopf in 2010.
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Susan Straight is an American author and National Book Award finalist. Susan Straight has published six novels, a novel for young readers and a... children's book. She has also written essays and articles for numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation and Harper's Magazine, and is a frequent contributor to NPR and Salon.com. Her story "Mines," first published in Zoetrope All Story, was included in Best American Short Stories 2003. She won a Lannan Literary Award in 2007. She won a 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for her short story "The Golden Gopher." She is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and lives in Riverside, California with two of her three daughters, her oldest now attending Oberlin College. As a student at Riverside Community College, Straight received encouragement to pursue her writing. She went on to earn a scholarship to the University of Southern California and, in 1984, earned her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.
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George Edgar Slusser , is an American scholar, professor and writer. Along with publisher/editor Robert Reginald, he is one of the co-founders and... Curator Emeritus of The J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, located in the Special Collections & Archives Department at the University of California, Riverside. He is married to French/American scholar, professor and writer, Danièle Chatelain. A host of science fiction writers and scholars have studied under Slusser, including Howard V. Hendrix, David Leiby, Bradford M. Lyau, Daryl F. Mallett and more.
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Gary Soto is a Mexican-American author and poet. Mexican-American parents Manuel and Angie Soto . In his youth, he worked in the fields of the San... Joaquin Valley and in factories in Fresno. Soto's father died in 1957, when he was five years old. As his family had to struggle to find work, he had little time or encouragement in his studies, hence, he was not a good student. Soto notes that in spite of his early academic record, while at high school he found writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Robert Frost and Thornton Wilder. Soto attended Fresno City College and California State University, Fresno, where he earned his B.A. degree in English in 1974, studying with poet Philip Levine. He did graduate work in poetry writing at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his M.F.A. in 1976. He states that he wanted to become a writer in college after discovering the novelist Gabriel García Márquez and the contemporary poets Edward Field, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, James Wright and Pablo Neruda, whom he calls "the master of them all.
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