Scary Stories Come in Small Packages(an AMA with Grant and Kim): Free Workshop| Tuesday October 27th | 4:00-5:00 pm PST

Scary Stories Come in Small Packages: An AMA with Kim and Grant

Kim holds an M.S. in Education, an MFA in Fiction, and has been teaching high school since 1997. She is the award-winning author of five YA novels. Her titles Catch a Falling Star; The Possibility of Now; and The Wonder of Us were Scholastic book club selections. She won the Northern California Book Award for YA fiction for Instructions for a Broken Heart as well as had The Possibility of Now named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year.

Her first novel for adults, Other People’s Kids (Sibylline 2025) is about (surprise, surprise) teachers, and was named a finalist for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) 2025 Golden Poppy Award in fiction. In addition to teaching high school, Kim sits on the Writers Council for National Writing Project and works as a fiction mentor with Dominican University of California’s MFA in Creative Writing. With 100-Word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing (Heinemann 2023), Kim finally found a way to blend her two professional loves, teaching and writing, into one book. These small, bright things have transformed her classroom and her own writing. She loves sharing their potential with other teachers and writers.

Grant Faulkner Bio:

Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of Memoir Nation (and also the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast), the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author. He was also Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for 12 years.

He has published three books on writing: The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story; Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide.

He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories, Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story.

His “flash novel,” something out there in the distance, a collaboration with the photographer Gail Butensky, is coming out in 2026 with the University of New Mexico Press.

His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s Flash Fiction America; New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction; and in several editions of the annual Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies.

His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He serves on the National Writing Project Writers Council, Litquake’s Board of Directors, the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Words’ Creative Council, and Left Margin Lit’s Advisory Board.