A Love Like Blood (15 page)

M
any thanks to the Otis College Graduate Writing Program, Beyond Baroque Fiction Workshop, the City of West Hollywood, West Hollywood Library, the Ann Arbor District Library, and Tishuan Scott for your generous support.

Specifically, I would like to thank my writing workshop instructors Peter Gadol, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jen Hofer, and Honoree Jeffers for pushing me past the ordinary to delight in the unexpected, to reach for strange-sounding words, and to write with an unusual magic. To my unofficial instructors, Staceyann Chin, Michelle Tea, Daphne Gottlieb, Samuel R. Delany, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Toni Morrison, thank you for your guidebooks to writing.

Diana Robertson, Paul Vangelisti, Daniel Lazar, David Groff, Hank Hendersen, Michael Che, Keith Boykin, Jeffrey King/In The Meantime, Winnie McCroy, Jason St. Amand, Raspin Stuwart, Kara Mondino, Joel Garcia, Laura Manchester, Kurt Thum, DJ Baker, L.R., and Antonio G.

©
Garen Hagobian

Victor Yates
was raised in Jacksonville, Florida and now lives in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Windy City Times, Gorgeous, and Edge. As a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Otis College, he is the recipient of an Ahmanson Foundation grant. He is the winner of the Elma Stuckey Writing Award (1st place in poetry). Two of his poems were included in the anthology, “For Colored Boys,” which was edited by Keith Boykin. The anthology won the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award. Also, he has taught writing workshops at the University of Southern California (for the Models of Pride Conference), Job Corps, Whaley Middle School (Compton), Gindling Hilltop Camp (Malibu), and Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy (Inglewood). This is his first novel.