Short Story Panel

Monday, June 10, 4-5 PM

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 seventy 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 Prize. Talley has two published novels and two 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 always wanted to be a writer, but she was "discovered" at a cocktail party and put under contract to Universal Studios as an actress. Over the next few years, she acted in numerous movies. She also went to UCLA Extension to learn the craft of writing. she wrote her first mystery novel, The Mother Shadow, which was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award.

The second mystery novel, Beauty Dies, soon followed. Turning to the short story form she created a new character, Diana Poole, an actress verging on middle age. The stories were published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Two have been nominated for the Barry Award. 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 to her book 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, regardless of the time and place in which we live. https://www.sbwriters.com/catherine-ann-jones


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 The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Narrative, The Idaho Review, and others. She holds a BA in Philosophy from The University of Western Ontario, a graduate degree in Portrait Photography from The London Institute, and an MFA from the University of Memphis. She has lived all over the world, but currently resides in Southern California, where she has taught fiction writing at Chapman University.