Speaking at the 5at Annual Santa Barbara Writers Conference , Mary Otis is the author of Burst, which is longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and won the 2023 Silver Medal in Literary Fiction from the Independent Book Publisher Awards. The deeply moving debut novel explores the relationship complexities between mothers and daughters, the desire to escape and the longing to connect. She’s also the author of Yes, Yes Cherries, a collection of short stories author Lorrie Moore called “funny, brave and amazing.” Quirky and hilarious, yet deeply human, they contain an affection for human strangeness while exploring the idea that truth tends more often to lie in the extremes and along the outer edges than it does at the center of things. A founding fiction professor in the UC Riverside MFA Program, Otis has also taught creative writing in the UCLA Writers’ Program.