Director

Andrea Mele (she/her/hers) is the fourth Director of LitHop Fresno. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and an MA in Literature from Fresno State University, and is a former Lecturer with Continuing Appointment in the Merritt Writing Program at UC Merced. She currently works as Program Coordinator at the Fresno Arts Council, serving artistic and literary communities and projects. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, South Loop Review, and The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture. Andrea has attended or presented at several literary and academic conferences, including the Tin House Writers Workshop, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Workshop, Conference on Community Writing, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs). She is a member of Leadership Fresno, Class 37 and serves on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit organization, Life in the Wildlands.

Staff

Juan Luis Guzmán (he/him/el), a poet, professor, and literary/performing arts director, earned an MFA in creative writing from Fresno State University. He has completed fellowships from Macondo Writers Workshop and CantoMundo, and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Huizache, PANK, and The Rumpus, among other journals, as well as the Letras Latinas Blog and Poet’s Quarterly. Guzman is the vice chairman of the Selma Arts Council and served as the second director of LitHop from 2017-2019. The former co-director for CantoMundo, Guzmán is a professor of English at Fresno City College.

Arien Alana Reed, MFA, a pushcart nominee, is an award-winning artist, muralist, novelist, and poet. He also volunteers on the board of Trans-E-Motion, a transgender nonprofit serving California’s Central Valley. His unpublished poetry collections have been finalists for the Kore Press, Grayson Books, Press 53, and Inlandia poetry prizes, and his poetic or artistic shenanigans have found their way into New South, Oberon, Florida Review, Sonora Review, High Shelf Press, J Mane Gallery, Allegory Ridge, and others. His poetic lunacy can be witnessed on Instagram at @arienreedwriting and his squeaky descent into artistic anarchy can be observed at @arienreedart 

Von Torres (he/him/his) was born in Fresno, California and raised in Clovis, California with parents who immigrated from the Philippines. He is a tenured professor at Clovis Community College in the English & Library Department and is believed to currently be one of two Filipino American men that are tenured and teach English in the entire California community college system. In addition, he is affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies at the college. He started as a student of poetry at Fresno City College in 2008 and earned his BA (2011) and MA (2014) in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His poetry has appeared in TAYO Literary Magazine and VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA: A Storm of Filipino Poets. He has self-published two chapbooks: HELLO my name is and "F" Sounds. He co-wrote four entries in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies: Arts & Humanities Introduction, Bahala Na, Poetry, and Spoken Word. He served as the third Director of LitHop from 2021-2022.

Advisors

Lee Herrick (he/him/his) is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of the anthology The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books, 2020). His writing appears widely in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies such as HERE: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form; Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, and elsewhere. He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States at ten months, he teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He co-founded LitHop in 2016.

Lisa Lee Herrick (she/her/hers) is the daughter of Hmong refugees and an award-winning Hmong-American writer, illustrator, and producer based in California. She co-founded Fresno’s LitHop literary arts festival after a decade working in journalism and television. She has been featured in and/or appeared on PBS, NPR, FOX, ABS-CBN, The Fresno Bee, the Houston Chronicle, and others. She is the editor at large for Hyphen and a regular contributor to The Rumpus, and advises nonprofit arts & public broadcasting organizations in media strategy and community outreach. Her creative nonfiction is honored as notable in the Best American Essays (2020-2021) and Best American Food Writing 2020. In May 2021, Herrick was awarded a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. In September 2021, she was announced as a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2021. Herrick is working on her debut book—a memoir in essays—as well as a cookbook on Hmong cultural food pathways and a graphic novel based in San Francisco at the new millennium.

Volunteers

LitHop also relies on its stellar event-day volunteers, to whom we’re deeply grateful.