Author photo by Trey Burnette
A new installment of a beach noir anthology series—containing stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, and local author Leanne Phillips among its National Book Award winners, Edgar and Shamus Award winners, and best-selling authors—is now available.
The Amber Waves of Autumn is the third in Kelp Journal’s award-winning series that blends literary, sci-fi, fantasy, and hard-boiled noir storytelling styles.
Phillips is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in journals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Persimmon Tree, The Coachella Review, and the New American Studies Journal. She earned her undergraduate degree in English from Cal Poly and her MFA from the University of California Riverside.
Phillips is the only local author represented in the anthology. Other contributors include Francesca Lia Block, Bev Vincent, Nik Xandir Wolf, Craig Clevenger, Hoda Mallone, Michael Newirth, Ioannis Argiris, Megan Eccles, David Zimmerle, Kathryn E. McGee, Sara Marchant, Curtis Ippolito, Jeff Kronenfeld, and Ruthie Marlenee.
The public is invited to a free book reading/signing at the San Luis Obispo Library Community Room on Saturday, October 26 at 6 p.m., to meet several of the authors, as well as the anthology’s editor, David M. Olsen, who writes under the pen name Nik Xandir Wolf.
The event includes a presentation from another local author, Nicholas Belardes, who is not represented in the anthology, but who has just published The Deading, a literary-leaning horror novel set on the Central Coast that The New York Times called a “dystopian eco-horror that perfectly balances social critique, lyricism and ghastliness.”