Venita Blackburn is the author of the debut novel Dead in Long Beach, CA, available from MCD Books.  

Blackburn's other books include the story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction; and another collection called How to Wrestle a Girl, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker online, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, and American Short Fiction. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. She lives in Fresno, California.

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