Euphronia Awakuni has lived and worked in Japan and traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and Europe. She has a Master's in TESOL and has taught at Glendale College, USC and LACC. She has taught English and ESL in Los Angeles at Evans Community Adult School for the last nine years.  She is currently working on a new novel. 

Planaria Price has taught English as a Second Language to adults for 37 years in Los Angeles.  She often lectures and is the author of five books on English and American culture, as well as a pronunciation book.  She is currently working on a Holocaust memoir: A Witness Forever, the Barbara Reichmann Story.

A launch event for the debut novel by this award-winning local author. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky was selected by indie booksellers as an IndieNext pick for February.

Heidi W. Durrow is the 2008 winner of the Bellwether Prize for the best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. She has also won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Chapter One Fiction Contest. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the Lois Roth Endowment and a Fellowship for Emerging Writers from the Jerome Foundation. Her writing has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Literary Review, and others.

A launch party for the debut novel by Michael Jaime-Becerra, author of the acclaimed short story collection Every Night is Ladies' Night.

Michael Jaime-Becerra grew up in El Monte, CA, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine and currently teaches creative writing at University of California, Riverside. His short story collection, Every Night Is Ladies' Night,was named to lists of the years' best books by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was awarded a California Book Award, the Silver Medal for a First Work of Fiction. Michael lives in El Monte, CA.

The talented Poet Douglas Kearney will be making his third appearance at Skylight Books, this time to present his new poetry collection The Black Automaton, which was selected for the National Poetry Series

Douglas Kearney's work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many fine publications and venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). His second manuscript, The Black Automaton, was chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series and was published by Fence Books in November 2009. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers' Award. He lives in the Valley with his family and teaches courses in African American poetry, opera and myth at California Institute of the Arts.

The Los Angeles launch of this first novel from Eric Puchner, the acclaimed author of the short story collection Music Through the Floor.

"Puchner is such a tremendously skilled writer, you barely notice how deftly he slips between points of view, how he creates characters that are so real their yearnings and failures become your own. This is a heartbreaking yet consistently funny novel that wraps its arms around all the beauty and tragedy of the unfulfilled American dream."
-- Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

Eric Puchner is an assistant professor of English at Claremont McKenna College. His award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous prominent journals and anthologies. He lives in Los Angeles.