Join us on the PCC Campus for the following live events:
Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a writer, a USC Law educated lawyer, performer and podcaster. Her YA memoir Tales of an Inland Empire Girl was published by Los Nietos Press in January 2022 and her hybrid chapbook Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender: or how I became a punk rock lawyer was released by Bamboo Dart Press in 2021. She was a recent Gold Medal winner for the Mariposa Award at the International Latino Book Awards 2022.
JEM has been published widely in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. She is an alum of the Macondo & VONA Writing Workshops and has presented at UCR Writers Week, Pasadena LitFest, the UCR Punk Conference, AWP and Beyond Baroque. She produced the ASA 2020 Freedom Course on Combatting Mass Incarceration.
JEM is in the low residency MFA program at UNO and works as a deputy public defender in Riverside County in mental health. On her Life of JEM live video podcast, she interviews writers. Find her on her author’s website at: https://juanitaemantz.com/.
PCC’s Writer-in-Residence Program aims to enrich the cultural environment of the College and the larger community by bringing to campus for a period of three days a distinguished local writer to interact with students, faculty, staff, and community members.
Writer-in-Residence events include classroom visits, writing workshops, a faculty luncheon, and a public reading. Writers-in-Residence are interviewed by editors of PCC’s literary magazine Inscape, the interview to be published in the magazine. The residency also offers our visiting writer a wonderful opportunity to promote a recent publication.
The Writer-in-Residence Program is funded by the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors and by several groups on campus, including the Student Services Division and the English and Language Studies Division.