LJ Digital

The Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine was created to meet the needs of a growing number of students who wish to read, study and write nonfiction prose. The program provides majors with a solid foundation in nonfiction writing and an equally solid background in areas such as literary history, which together will help make them more informed writers.

The LJ Digital blog is managed by UC Irvine assistant professor of literary journalism, Erika Hayasaki.

UCI Literary Journalism Faculty

*Barry Siegel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He directs the Literary Journalism program at UC Irvine where he is a professor of English. He is the author of six books, including three volumes of narrative nonfiction — A Death in White Bear Lake, Shades of Gray, and Claim of Privilege — and three novels set in imaginary Chumash County on the central coast of California.

*Patricia Pierson is the assistant director of the Literary Journalism program at UC Irvine. Her research interests include psychoanalysis, the contemporary novel, and nonfiction life writing, including memoir and autobiography. Patricia holds a PhD in comparative literature from UC Irvine, and is the editor of Kiosk, a magazine for literary journalism students. 

*Amy Wilentz is a professor of English in the UC Irvine Literary Journalism program. Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper’s, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, The San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books and many other publications. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent of The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.

*Carol Burke is a professor in English who combines her ethnographic skills as a folklorist with her interest in literary journalism. Her publications include Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight, a study of military culture; Women’s Visions, a book that explores accounts of the supernatural and the uncanny exchanged by women in prison; The Creative Process (coauthored with Molly Tinsley), a creative writing text; Plain Talk and Back in Those Days, collections of family folklore—the latter coauthored with Martin Light; and Close Quarters, a collection of poems. She has written for The Nation and The New Republic as well as scholarly journals and collections. Before joining the faculty at UCI in 2004, Professor Burke taught courses in literary journalism at Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins Universities.

*Miles Corwin, a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of three nonfiction books: The Killing Season, a national bestseller; And Still We Rise, the winner of the PEN West award for nonfiction and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and Homicide Special, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He recently published Kind of Blue, his first novel. The next book in the Ash Levine series, Midnight Alley, will be released in April 2012. Miles is a professor of English in the UC Irvine Literary Journalism program. 

*Erika Hayasaki spent nine years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she was a staff metro reporter, education writer, and New York-based national correspondent. She recently published a Kindle Single, Dead or Alive, and she is also the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book from Simon & Schuster about a professor of death and her students. Erika is an assistant professor in the UC Irvine Literary Journalism program.

*Amy DePaul is an award-winning writer whose articles have appeared on numerous websites and in major metropolitan newspapers, including the Washington Post. She covers public health for VoiceofOC.org and runs a blog on interviewing, InterviewNerd.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University and master’s degree in English literature from UC Irvine, where she teaches reporting classes.

LJ Digital Intern

Cleo Tobbi

Cleo Tobbi is a fourth year literary journalism student at the

University of California, Irvine. She is a staff writer for the UCI

newspaper, The New University and is also a blogging intern for

filmledger.com. She can be contacted at ctobbi@uci.edu