Jervey Tervalon

Jervey Tervalon, MFA, is the award-winning, Los Angeles Times bestselling author of five books including Understanding This, a novel based on his experiences teaching at Locke High School in Los Angeles, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Jervey was born in New Orleans and raised in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Los Angeles where he attended Foshay Junior High. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine and was a Disney Screenwriting fellow and a Shanghai Writers Association Fellow. He is the Founder of Literature for Life. He is also the Co-founder of LitFest in the Dena (originally named LitFest Pasadena). Currently he teaches fiction writing and Literature at the College of Creative Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef was published by Amistad/HarperCollins.