Wednesday, May 12 - Michael Jaime-Becerra

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK is Michael Jaime-Becerra. He is an internationally-acclaimed fiction writer who grew up in El Monte, California and whose writing makes beautiful and elegant the harsh, complicated lives of working-class people. After the remarkable success of his collection Every Night is Ladies’ Night, he’s written a novel, This Time Tomorrow, a book with the characterization and plot of Chekhov and the detailed description, setting and careful celebration of place you’d expect in a novel of social realism. It takes place in Southern California, with visits to familiar locales including the LA Flower Mart, downtown music clubs, Legg Lake, and captures moments of culture and everyday life in Southern California that readers will easily fall into. Michael Jaime-Becerra is an elegant writer whose prose doesn’t flinch at truth or miss a chance to be sad, beautiful and redemptive. He is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at UC Irvine and now teaches Creative Writing at the UC Riverside.