Amanda Alfonso (Screenwriting) formed her filmic consciousness as a lonely teen, borrowing screwball comedy movies at the library and watching TCM marathons to keep the blues away. While she aims to experiment more with genre and style, she primarily writes dark comedies about people living on the periphery and their attempts to articulate their relationships, identities, and desires within that space.

When not creating characters, she’s probably listening to her favorite song on repeat (“Bad Decisions” by The Strokes) or watching something she will equally love and scoff at (French films).

She received her BFA in Motion Pictures and Television from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. 

Noah Amir Arjomand (Screenwriting) is an Iranian-American filmmaker and author. His first (co-directed, co-produced) feature-length documentary, Eat Your Catfish, is about his mother’s last years with the motor-neuron disease ALS. The film premiered in 2021 at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and won Best Documentary at Istanbul Film Festival.

Cambridge University Press published Noah’s first book, Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria, in 2022. Fixing Stories explores the worlds of the “fixers” who act as brokers between foreign reporters and local sources from behind the scenes. He has also written about politics, culture, and media in Middle East and Central Asia for Dissent, Public Culture, Tehran Bureau, The Afghanistan Analysts Network, Profil, American Anthropologist, The New Arab, and others.

Noah earned a PhD in sociology from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University. Before coming to Riverside, Noah lived in Bloomington, Indiana, where he taught at Indiana University. He likes cats and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Aron Brown (Fiction) is a non-binary bisexual Angeleno who learned to read at a very early age by imitating their parents, holding the book upside down, and making up most of the words. This put them on the road to composing stories for the rest of their life. Many years later, they graduated from Wellesley College with a major in Cinema and Media Studies. They are obsessed with history, literature (especially Shakespeare), comics, and tabletop RPGs. Aron also spent many years writing fanfiction, but don’t look it up.

Kristen Herbert (Fiction) is native to the Chicago area, but spent the last several years in Budapest and rural Hungary. She translates contemporary Hungarian literature to English, namely young poets. Her fiction work explores dysfunctional relationships, addiction, and dissatisfaction with the self. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. Her studies were in English Literature and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the Hungarian literary translation workshop at the Balassi Institute in Budapest. In her best life she travels often.

Victoria Hurtado-Angulo (Poetry) is a Latina Master's candidate at UCR for Creative Writing. She has been a featured reader and orchestrator at open mic events, held lectures for independent and academic poetry workshops, and published poetry ranging from zines to established publications such as About Place Journal/Black Earth Institute, EveryLibrary, and Bangalore Review. Her play What these flowers do at night/ a message to the world was featured in UCR’s Latino Play Production this year. She is a former Macondista and served as a Macondo reader panelist in March 2023. 

Victoria has hosted two Writer’s Week panels in-person and online for writers such as Allison Hedgecoke and Jan Beatty. Besides academic work, Victoria is Co-Founder of Art of Nothing Press, a California publication for poetry, short stories, and visual art. In this press, she coordinates events, delegates what community looks like as it evolves, and helps create a collective safe space with other creators, artists, and musicians.

There is no real way to explain why she writes, but it’s necessary for her survival. Victoria likes doing things in life for the bit when it actually adds to her poetics, like costuming for children’s birthday parties to ending up on someone’s boat and helping film a music video. She’s open to community collaborations in the arts and sharing spotify playlists.

Ruth Madrid is a playwright and screenwriter living in Riverside, California. Originally from
Maywood, CA, Ruth focuses on uplifting relevant and unique stories from her community by
rooting them on untouched corners of Latinx identities and experiences. Ruth steers away from digestible mainstream Latinx stories to tell more unconventional stories about her community through theater and film.

During her time in UCR as an undergraduate, Ruth has staged various plays with UCR Latinx Play Project, an on-campus Latinx Theater Organization. Such plays included "El Recalentado" (2018), "Inolvidable" (2019), and excerpts from "Madres de Latinoamérica" (2020). Ruth has also written short plays for theaters in Los Angeles such as "Una Hora Mas" (2018) and "La Tormenta de Ayer" (2019). 

Ruth has also written and directed short films including "Hourglass" (2023) and "The Clean Up" (2023). Ruth is currently researching and writing an original feature film about the IE garage rock community.

H.M. Minger Urquilla (Playwriting) is a Salvadoran from Los Angeles. In addition to playwriting she dabbles in poetry, directing, and the occasional acting role. She holds a B.A. in English with a Theatre minor from CSULA, where she served as poetry editor on their student magazine, STATEMENT. While her work is largely rooted in Magical Realism, she hopes to explore as many genres as she can get her hands on.

Debbie Ou -she/her- (Fiction) graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in Writing Seminars and works as a designer of voice recognition systems. She is interested in writing strange stories about faith, technology, and reclusion. In her free time, she hikes, sews, and throws pots on the wheel.

Yoselin Saucedo -she/her- (Creative Nonfiction) was born and raised in Southern California. She has lived in New York and Colombia. She has explored Canada as she occupied a police station with Black Lives Matter Toronto. She has explored Mexico after attending La Fiestas Del Sol to see a Caifanes reunion. And she's explored southern and Midwest states through her community organizing. Though she has explored many places, she calls Riverside, California home. She holds a Bachelor's in Creative Writing and is on her way to an MFA. Yoselin is a mother, a student, and a community organizer. In March 2020, Yoselin published a personal essay titled "Mexican Boy."  "Mexican Boy" was nominated for a Pushcart award in November 2020. Her focus is Creative non-fiction stories and personal essays. She writes about her life, living with a chronic illness, being Afro-Latina and being a mother.

Corey Spanner (Fiction) is a writer living in Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Appalachian Ohio and received his bachelor's degree from Ohio University in 2017. He worked various jobs in LA for five years before deciding to pursue a Master's and write novels. In his free time he likes to read comics and watch baseball. 

Kali Veach (Screenwriting) is a writer and director interested in absurd connections, tragicomic consequences, queer perspectives, and the ways in which organizations and individuals interface with emerging technologies. After receiving her BA in Creative Writing from UCR, she taught English as a Second Language before transitioning to film production. Upon returning to UCR, she was selected as the writer-director for the fall 2021 Gluck Film Ensemble Fellowship. Her fiction, poetry, and scripts have been published in Mosaic, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. As a child she moved cross-country several times, between St. Louis, Baltimore, and Huntington Beach, but now lives in Los Angeles with her wife. She is in various stages of development and production on several projects.