By Andrew Jimenez
From writing the first words of a manuscript to being adopted by a publisher, the road to publication is paved with countless challenges. Meet four humanities alumni who published new books in 2025 – some of whom for the very first time! Their work spans academic texts, short story collections, novels and more, proving there’s no single path from Anteater to author.
Some Final Beauty and Other Stories by Lisa Alvarez
In Lisa Alvarez’s ‘92 (M.F.A., Fiction) 30+ year career, she has edited three anthologies and published stories, journalism and poetry, among many other accomplishments. Alvarez became a debut book author at 64 with her short story collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories.
Some Final Beauty and Other Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2025) is a powerful collection of short stories that take place in the very real setting of Southern California, from Los Angeles to Orange County to San Diego. The stories are tied together by themes of self-discovery, rebellion and solidarity, and take place between the presidencies of Reagan's 1980s and Trump’s first term.
When Alvarez began to want what most serious writers desire – a book – she took a look at her long publication career to see if she had somehow already written one. Across small journals and magazines, she counted up eleven stories that, when brought together, showcase women and Chicanx characters and their stories of resistance, strength, community and the effort to do the right thing in hard times.
Alvarez submitted her manuscript to two independent presses and was picked up by the University of Nevada Press as part of its New Oeste series, which celebrates Latinx writers in the American West. She reveals that “clever readers can locate veiled appearances by an acclaimed folksinger; a legendary Hollywood actor; a barrier-breaking African-American singer, actor and activist; an esteemed singer-songwriter; a pair of beloved celebrity chefs; a charismatic big city mayor; and a famous cranky actor-comedian,” – all Southern California celebrities who make cameos in her short story collection!
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Elaine Hsieh Chou ‘09 (B.A., English) is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. She debuted in 2022 with her satirical political fiction novel, Disorientation. Her portfolio includes essays appearing in The Cut and Vanity Fair as an award-winning short fiction writer, and she has been named a “Gotham Series Creator to Watch.” Chou’s first published short story, Bird, was published in UCI’s undergraduate literary magazine, New Forum.
Where Are You Really From (Penguin Press, 2025) has already been named one of TIME Magazine’s must-read books of 2025. This collection of six surrealist short stories and a novella explores how stories, especially the ones we tell ourselves, create a gap between who we believe ourselves to be, how the outside world sees us and what occurs in the in-between.
When Chou attended NYU to study for her M.F.A. in fiction, she had planned to workshop her first novel, Disorientation, which she had been writing at the time. The process of having her novel criticized while she was still developing it was restricting her creative process, so she instead began submitting short stories to her workshops. She experimented with genres and forms she hadn’t touched before, from body horror to a noir detective story. During her time in the program, she realized, “Wait, am I creating a short story collection?”
Chou committed herself to writing flawed, complicated Asian characters she had never encountered before in her reading. She drew inspiration from whatever she was feeling most strongly about at the time – from her fascination with the mail-order bride industry to her personal experience as a background actor in New York. Chou reflected on her choice to return to writing fiction after having stepped away for several years: “I wanted to return to my first love – creative writing – which was intimidating because if you love something, you’re afraid to fail at it.”
Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
Hannah Deitch ‘19 (M.A. English) is a former SAT tutor and arts magazine editor. Alongside her M.A. in English, where she specialized in Marxist theory and contemporary pop culture, she holds an M.A. in journalism from USC. In addition to her recently published novel, Killer Potential, her work can be found in the LA Times, LA Weekly, and LA Review of Books.
Killer Potential (William Morrow, 2025) follows Evie Gordan, a SAT tutor who, when arriving for a tutoring session at a rich client’s house, discovers her client's parents both dead and a woman tied up in a closet. The two become suspects in this crime thriller, where Evie must prove her innocence before being caught by the police.
The inspiration for Deitch’s debut novel came in 2021, when she was struggling to pay rent, despite two master’s degrees and a full-time job. She dreaded the prospect of taking on a second job – particularly SAT tutoring, which she’d done for a decade while working her way through college. Soon, an idea struck: What if an SAT tutor showed up to one of her wealthiest students’ homes for a session and found the teenager’s parents dead and a woman held hostage in the house? She began working on the project immediately.
Killer Potential faced difficulties from its very concept when Deitch’s first agent (who had been trying to publish a dystopian novel by Deitch) rejected the book. Pivoting to writing for the crime/thriller space, Deitch found a new literary agent. They took the novel to auction, where there was a nineteen-bidder auction in the U.S., a ten-bidder auction in the U.K. and an auction for film/TV rights. Reflecting on her debut novel’s success, Deitch emphasized, “All of that’s just to say – rejection is a major part of this industry. It’s so subjective, and there is no such thing as an overnight success.”
Grievous Entanglement by Erin Pearson
Dr. Erin Pearson ‘14 (Ph.D., English) is an Associate Professor of English at Elon University, where her research focuses on slavery, race and consumption in 19th-century transatlantic literature. Before her recent publication, her work had appeared in English Literary History, MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Abaslom! (2023).
Grievous Entanglement (University of Virginia Press, 2025) explores how people in the Atlantic World during the 18th and 19th centuries became complicit with slavery through consumption. Through the examination of poetry, political cartoons, blackface minstrelsy, slave narratives and novels of the era, Pearson examines how the consumption of slave-produced products, such as cotton or sugar, shaped ideas about slavery.
The origins of Grievous Entanglement can be traced directly back to her time at UCI. As part of her required reading, she encountered Love and Theft by Eric Lott. Within the famous study of blackface minstrelsy was a comment about the depiction of enslaved people as objects, and she combined this idea with her interest in European slaver Matthew Lewis, who framed his complicity with slavery through consumption imagery. These threads led to her dissertation on the metaphors of cannibalism used in slavery discourse.
After graduation, Pearson transitioned from post-doc to lecturer to full-time faculty, relocating states three times and becoming a mother along the way. Throughout, she continued to develop her dissertation, expanding it to examine how consumption encouraged complicity with treating humans as products. Through many years of development, Pearson remained motivated by her belief that “understanding how people both made sense of slavery and resisted the system can offer crucial insights for seemingly intractable problems in the present, including racial injustice and climate change.”
About Andrew Jimenez
Andrew Jimenez is a freelance writer and aspiring journalist. He wishes to use his lifelong passion for writing and research to inspire and inform others through his works. Jimenez graduated from UCI in 2024 with a B.A. in History.
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