Moderator Karen K. Ford, SBWC workshop leader, is an award-winning author of short fiction whose honors include top prizes from Narrative and bosque. Her work has been shortlisted for the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize and anthologized in Ginosko. Karen lives in Southern California, with her rescue mutt, Dude, where she is a freelance editor and writing coach.

Max Talley has had 70 stories and essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Litro, and The Saturday Evening Post. He won the 2021 best fiction contest in Jerry Jazz Musician for “Celestial Vagabonds,” later nominated for a Pushcart. Talley has two published novels and 2 story collections, My Secret Place, and the most recent, When the Night Breathes Electric, which debuted in 2023 from Borda Books.

Matthew J. Pallamary is an award-winning writer, musician, and sound healer who’s been studying shamanism all his life. He has books covering several genres. His latest story collection is The Thinning Veil: 13 Twisted Tales. He explores how art imitates life and reflects our human condition. The veil between the worlds is thinning and the boundaries have become blurred, bringing more weight to the question; what or where are the boundaries between what we believe to be real and what we imagine?

Melodie Johnson Howe, while acting in movies, went to UCLA Extension to learn writing. Her mystery novel, The Mother Shadow was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award. Her second, Beauty Dies, soon followed. She created a new character, Diana Poole, an actress verging on middle age, for her short stories. They’re now collected into one book, Shooting Hollywood: The Diana Poole Stories. Howe’s latest novel is City of Mirrors, also featuring Diana Poole.

Catherine Ann Jones who is an actor, the playwright of 11 award-winning productions, and an Emmy-nominated Hollywood screenwriter, wrote her latest book, East and West, from a personal place. This collection of stories reveals her lifelong relationship to India, including her marriage to Raja Rao, the renowned Indian novelist. The preface pays tribute to India’s timeless interweaving of the spiritual and the worldly, the light and dark, the personal and the universal. These stories speak to a place within each of our souls.

Lisa Cupolo has been a paparazzi photographer in London, an aid worker in Kenya, a script doctor in LA, and a literary publicist at HarperCollins in Toronto. Have Mercy on Us, her debut book, won the W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections. Her work has been published in many prestigious journals. She holds multiple degrees in a range of areas. She’s lived all over the world, but currently resides in Southern California, where she taught fiction writing at Chapman University.

The Art of the Query

Trey Dowell is a novelist and a short story aficionado. His expertise in writing effective query letters has helped numerous writers get their projects reviewed by agents and publishers.

In this presentation Trey focused on sparking curiosity and building anticipation. Proven query strategies and methods were discussed. Attendees brought their in-progress queries which were read and received feedback.

Be Your Own Best Publicist

Melinda Palacio & Lida Sideris

This session offers wisdom from the trenches from award-winning authors on promoting your project. You’ll get practical marketing advice on aspects of building an author platform and putting yourself and your book out there.

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker. She’s the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature, a BA from the UC Berkeley and an MA from UC Santa Cruz. She’s a 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 2018. She is a master of author self-promotion.

Lida Sideris writes soft-boiled mysteries and was a winner of the Helen McCloy Mystery Writers of America scholarship award. The third installment in her Southern California Mystery series, Murder: Double or Nothing will be released in June by Level Best Books. She’s also wrote The Cookie Eating Fire Dog, a picture book for ages 4-8. She lives in the northern tip of SoCal with her family, rescue dogs and a flock of uppity chickens. She teaches “Be Your Own Best Publicist” at SBWC with Melinda Palacio.

Antoine Wilson’s most recent novel Mouth to Mouth was featured on Barack Obama’s

Summer Reading List and was a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, the CALIBA Golden

Poppy Award, and the Prix Fitzgerald. Antoine is also the author of the novels Panorama City

and The Interloper, and he is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space. He’s

a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction

Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin.

Zohreh Ghahremani writes for both adults and children. Her debut picture book, Memory

Garden, illustrated by her daughter, Susie, was published by Godwin Books/Macmillan in 2024,

with another picture book about Norooz/Persian New Year to follow in 2026. She published

her first novel, Sky of Red Poppies, in 2010. Her sophomore novel, The Moon Daughter, won

Writer’s Digest Book Awards for Best Literary Fiction. She’s also the author of The Commiserator

(in Persian) and has contributed to numerous other literary volumes.

Moderator, Perie Longo, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, 2007-2009, has published 4 books of poetry, the latest Baggage Claim (2014) and poems in numerous literary journals. This June will be her 40th year teaching poetry at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She’s thrilled and awed to be still poeting and standing.

Melinda Palacio, current Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, is an award-winning writer. From South Central LA, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature. A 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she published Bird Forgiveness in 2018.

David Starkey, Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate, Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at SBCC, and the Publisher/Co-editor of Gunpowder Press, published 11 full length collections of poetry and more than 500 poems in literary journals. His novel Poor Ghost was released in March 2024.

Chryss Yost is a Santa Barbara Poet Laureate who served from 2013-2015. She was awarded the 2013 Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize and other honors, including Pushcart Prize nominations. She’s co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Her collection Mouth & Fruit was published 2014, and her poems have been included in the most popular poetry textbooks in the country and widely anthologized elsewhere.

Enid Osborn Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara 2017-2019, published When the Big Wind Comes, set in New Mexico. A Pushcart nominee, her work appears in regional California and Southwest journals. She has a series of themed chapbooks, and she co-edited A Bird Black as the Sun / California Poets on Crows & Ravens in 2011.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate 2019-2021, is author of 6 collections of poems and is the recipient of a Pushcart. She taught at Emerson, Sarah Lawrence, UCSB, and is part of the faculty at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Lately: New and Selected Poems was published January 2024.

Emma Trelles Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2021-2023, received an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She was named a Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. Daughter of Cuban immigrants, she’s author of Tropicalia, winner of the Andrés Montoya Prize.

Paul Willis, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2011-2013 is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he’s been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac and nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. His YA Elizabethan time-travel novel, All in a Garden Green, was released in 2020.

To everyone who has attended the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and are now part of our tribe of scribes, here is the first post of the audio from the 2024 conference.

For those of you who have recently discovered the conference and are considering attending, we will be posting the audio periodically so you can get a sense of this amazing week long experience which has been going for over fifty years now.

This first post from the 2024 conference is the Orientation and Welcome which will give you a sense of the conference along with tidbits that will help you get the most from the conference.

We are looking forward to 2025!

Author Matthew Pallamary discussed shamanic practices and ceremonies in the jungle, including the use of psychedelic plant medicines like ayahuasca. He detailed a 10-day program he does in the jungle that involves a cleansing diet and various visionary plants. "Your perception gets more refined. It gets very clear. You start having telepathic experiences. And you really feel like you become a part of the jungle," he said of the experience. Highlighting the importance of altering one's perception to gain new perspectives and understandings, he noted that insights from ayahuasca can be similar to what is gleaned from some types of therapy.

You discover who you are by going into your shadow and integrating those parts of yourself that you have denied, he remarked, adding that every time you bring these parts back to yourself, you're bringing in the energy that you've had to use to keep various traumas in place, and as a result of this, energy becomes more available to you and your awareness expands. The center of the universe is located between one's eyes, he declared, and this represents the shift from personality-centered to essence-centered awareness. Pallamary also talked about his fiction writing process and how the art of storytelling is a form of magic-- the word 'spelling' actually comes from the notion of casting a spell, he pointed out.