May 2025 RC Literary Arts Presents 2025-26 Line up

September 4, 2025. Joan Schoettler Joan grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where memories of trips to the ocean, picnics in parks, walks through San Francisco, museum visits, and gatherings of family and friends continue to draw her back to her beginnings. Hikes in the Sierra, late dinners on warm summer nights, and gardening, as well as grandchildren, reading, and travel, fill her days, weaving ideas and inspiration for her writing. A number of years ago she asked a celebrated children’s writer where her stories came from. The author challenged her to find them within. She took pen to paper, and, like magic, stories flowed. Well, perhaps not quite so easily. After extensive reading, studying craft, writing, innumerable rewrites, considerable editing, and countless submissions, a long-awaited box of books arrived on her front porch.

October 16, 2025. David Campos Poet David Campos is the son of Mexican immigrants, a CantoMundo Fellow, the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), and American Quasar (Red Hen, 2021). His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Normal School. He's the winner of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and the Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for the best group of poems in Prairie Schooner. He teaches English at Fresno City College. He lives in Clovis, California.

November 13, 2025 Soreath Hok She is a multimedia journalist with 16 years of experience in radio, television and digital production. At KVPR, she covers local government, politics and other local news. She is Cambodian-American and began her journalism career in Fresno, graduating from Fresno State with a B.A. in English and minor in Mass Communication & Journalism. She has worked as a producer in broadcast news. And she has explored other creative outlets outside of news in advertising, marketing and social media. But radio is where her love for production really started and she is happy to be back in the medium and returning to her roots in journalism.

Feb 6: RC Lit Arts Fundraiser, McClarty Center

Feb TBA: Mai Der Vang , Poet, in McClarty Center

Primordial https://maidervang.com/

March TBA: SFO Shakespeare, in McClarty Center

April TBA: Tim Hernandez, Author One Book, One College

Non-fiction: The Call You Back https://timzhernandez.com/

Tim Z. Hernandez, in his highly anticipated memoir, encapsulates his calling of searching for people throughout his  life. Hernandez is an award-winning author, investigative researcher, performer and documentary filmmaker. As an award-winning author, his work consists of poetry, novels, historical fiction, memoir, and screenplays, many of them having been recognized for their excellence. A few of these works include Skin Tax, Breathing, in Dust, Natural Takeover Of Small Things, Manana Means Heaven, and All They Will Call You. In this memoir, titled They Call You Back, Mr. Hernandez invites us on a journey of personal and collective history to uncover the connections in which stories bind us to one another. Hernandez is on a mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane crash that occurred at Los Gatos Canyon. He first introduced this story in his acclaimed documentary novel They Will Call You, which has received high praise. They Call You Back is a continuation of Hernandez's search for the victims of the plane crash, as he looks within himself and his ancestral past to reveal his motives in pursuit of these investigations. He recognizes his own lifelong journey of struggles with memory, addiction, generational trauma, and spirituality. They Call You Back encapsulates the true chronicle of the obsession of one man to restore justice in an undignified segment of America’s past. They Call You Back is the tenth addition to Reedley College’s One Book One College program, presenting a riveting true story of the inequities ever present in the history of America.