UC’s Emerging Fiction Writers Festival

American fiction readers tend to gravitate toward the low-hanging pop-fiction fruit of books like Fifty Shades of Grey instead of more literary, worldview-challenging works. Three young authors in town for UC’s Emerging Fiction Writers Festival (March 11–13), however, have published novels in the latter category. So we asked: How do they make a living writing “smart” fiction?

Photographs: Park courtesy Park / Nutting by Aaron Mayes / Bakopoulos by Julian Goldberger

Originally published in the March 2015 issue.