My guest this week is acclaimed short story writer and, now, novelist Venita Blackburn. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California arrives after two acclaimed short story collections, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl. This new novel is a multi-form, multi-voiced chronicle of loss, self-discovery, of desperately sad if also playful strategies of identity and investigation. Its brilliant premise is matched by its engagement with language, much of it delivered via a collective consciousness which frames the storytelling, a formal device which makes such good sense because the protagonist is an author herself, of a dystopian graphic novel.  Dead in Long Beach, California is also a story of a Black LA family and of life in Southern California. Venita Blackburn’s earlier work has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction and the New Yorker online. She is an associate professor in creative writing at Cal State Fresno and founder-president of Live, Write, an organization that offers free creative writing workshops for communities of color.