Malena Watrous, a San Francisco native, is the author of the novel If You Follow Me (Harper Perennial 2010). The manuscript won the Michener-Copernicus Award, and the first section of the novel was runner-up in the Pirate's Alley/Faulkner contest. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Believer, GlimmerTrain, the Massachussetts Review, Salon.com, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She contributes regular book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.

She attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop on a Truman Capote Fellowship, and in 2002 she was the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, followed by a Jones Lectureship. She now works for Stanford as a head instructor in the Online Writer's Workshop. Malena Watrous lives in San Francisco with her husband, Matt Schumaker, their son Max, and two cranky cats.

HearSay is a monthly reading series hosted by the Writing and Literature Program. It features CCA students and established Bay Area writers. All HearSay events include delicious refreshments!