Upcoming guest speakers

Ava Homa is an acclaimed author, speaker, activist, and faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her debut novel, Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins & Abrams, 2020), was featured in Roxane Gay's Book Club, the Unplugged Book Box, and Women for Women International. The novel earned a place among the 'best books' in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Independent (UK), and Globe and Mail (Canada). It received the 2020 Nautilus Silver Book Award for Fiction and was a 2022 William Saroyan International Writing Prize finalist. A groundbreaking work in English by a Kurdish woman, Daughters of Smoke and Fire has been incorporated into university curricula at institutions such as George Mason University, the University of Toronto, and Southern Methodist University.

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Ava's collection of short stories, Echoes from the Other Land, was nominated for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her essays, written in English, Kurdish, and Persian, have been published in outlets like the BBC, Literary Review of Canada, Open Democracy, and Literary Hub. Her short stories and non-fiction pieces have been anthologized and she has delivered speeches across North America and Europe, including a memorable appearance at the United Nations in Geneva. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing and is a 2023 California Arts Council fellow.

Yes, we know. It's only the first of November. Still, your CCW board is looking ahead to December, scouting for ideas for a holiday event that would appeal to you. We've already reserved the Center for Spiritual Awakening for our regular third Tuesday evening, in this case December 16. 

Instead of a speaker, we'd like to plan activities that you would find fun and possibly useful. Some ideas being floated:

• Member talent show
• A “round robin” story (each member writing one sentence and passing it along)
• Goal-setting for 2026 when it comes to our writing and publishing
• Screening of The CWC Story, a 15-minute video about the history of California Writers Club

Now it's your turn. What sort of activities, silly or serious, would entice you out of the house to mix and mingle with your fellow writers on a Tuesday evening in December? Let us know by emailing President Scotty, scotty@scottycornfield.com. ​

Matthew Clark Davison will discuss how writers can discover surprising avenues to develop new work by combining cross-genre strategies. There are intentional methods for working with what the subconscious provides. This session explores how, once you’ve mined the right side of the brain, you can bring the left side back online to help organize what you’ve gathered so that it earns the attention of an audience. 

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author (with bestselling writer Alice LaPlante) of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton ’25). With LaPlante, Davison offers innovative generative writing workshops both online and live. Matthew is also the author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21), which was championed by several luminaries, including Michael Cunningham, Ann Packer, and Justin Torres. It was hailed as a “...Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007. 

Matthew is a member of The Writers Grotto and has served on the board of Foglifter Journal and Press. He is Emeritus Faculty in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where he also earned a BA and MFA. You can find out about all upcoming offerings and recent publications at matthewclarkdavison.com.