Writing Certificates > The Writer's Spotlight > Fall 2025
Fall Writer's Spotlight
In this Issue:
- Upcoming Events
- Open Fall Courses
- Feature Essays: Raj Oza and Shirin Yim Leos
Want to receive this as a quarterly email? Join our email list and select "The Writer's Spotlight" mailing list!
Upcoming Events
Happy fall, Stanford Continuing Studies writers! We are excited to start this issue by sharing news of upcoming readings, taking place both at Litquake and on campus.
On Friday, October 24, at 10:00 am, there will be an informal reading upstairs in the Stanford bookstore, featuring the students who are here for the weekend to celebrate having recently completed the two-year Novel Writing Certificate. These student novelists will read brief selections from their new manuscripts. All are welcome to come and listen!
On Saturday, October 25, a group of five students from the Novel Writing Certificate will read in San Francisco’s LitCrawl, an integral and iconic part of the Litquake festival. The Stanford reading will take place in phase 3 of the event: from 8:00-9:00 pm, at Manny’s in the Mission. If you’re in the city (or want a good excuse to make a trip there), we’d love to have you in the audience.
Learn more about both events here »
Open Fall Courses
Explore two fall creative writing courses with late start dates that you can still sign up for:
The Creative Habit: Cultivate a Daily Writing Practice (now closed)
October 29–December 3 | Online
Discover how writing just a little every day can diminish the anxiety of the blank page, spark your creativity, and help form a lasting creative habit.
Beyond Scene: The Secrets to Writing Page-Turning Summary (now closed)
November 8 | On Campus
Learn to create compelling narrative summaries that compress time and convey key information in this immersive, one-day course.
Last summer in Cincinnati, during a multiday wedding celebration, whenever people asked me what I did, I said, "I'm a writer." Pity my wife, Mangla, who had to hear (and hear and hear) the novel's situation and story. After my nth repetition of a far-too-long version of the synopsis that is in my publisher’s press release, Mangla said, "How about you just tell them it's historical fiction." Anyway, that's what I heard her say. Maybe my dear wife was so tired of my pitch that she actually said "hysterical fiction."
When I first contemplated writing a novel, I had little idea about which genre would inform the writing.
Before Stanford’s Novel Writing Certificate, while raising a family and tending to my career in Silicon Valley, I had been writing for several decades: book reviews, travel pieces, and a few short stories published here and there. Despite two short story courses at Stanford, I really didn’t have a writing background...I felt like an impostor...a very earnest impostor.
When I slowed down my consulting practice during the COVID pandemic, I tried my hand at long-form fiction. First, I attempted a series of linked short stories set in neighborhoods along Chicago’s elevated train system. When that false start didn’t make it past a few stops on the Red Line, I wrote the first chapters of what evolved into Double Play on the Red Line. That draft was an uneven effort resulting in a less-than-compelling opening and a baggy middle that was heavily dependent on an epistolary relationship. The novel’s ending was out of my grasp.
So, I did what any self-respecting writer might do: I procrastinated by shifting genres and taking a memoir class. It was a terrific class, and perhaps I’ll return to memoir in the new program here at Stanford. But during the middle of that course with John Evans, I learned about the Novel Writing Certificate, applied, and was pleasantly surprised that I was admitted. I was torn between memoir and novel.
I felt that I should proceed with the memoir; my parents were getting old and I worried that the clock might run out on me. But my novel kept calling me, and I knew that I didn’t have the toolkit to complete it to publication. The stakes were high. It was a now-or-never decision around becoming a novelist.
I thought back to college when I worked with my senior thesis advisor. I also considered my doctoral studies when my dissertation chair guided me all the way to the hooding ceremony. The Novel Writing Certificate’s 1:1 tutorial is a similar capstone. My decision was made. I gratefully accepted Stanford’s offer and pivoted to learning how to read, write, and revise a novel.
My first instructor, Angela Pneuman, taught me about in medias res; as a result, one morning at 3:00, in an inspired fever dream, I completely rewrote my opening chapter by jumping right into the action. Angela also partnered with me in our 1:1 tutorial; I like to think of it as an ideal and idea-generating weekly dialogue. That, along with a great deal of encouragement from my writers’ group (we meet most Sundays and call ourselves SOWN—as in Stanford’s Openhearted Writers & Novelists) got Double Play on the Red Line across the finish line and accepted by Third World Press.
It’s a story of injustice, alliance, and hope between two American men of color—one Black, one Indian—bound by a brutal encounter in Wrigley Field’s iconic bleachers. Ernie was poised to become one of the first Black players in the Major Leagues. But on the eve of his historic debut in the 1950s, his life is derailed by a wrongful conviction that steals 16 years from him. When he returns to Wrigley in 1969, it’s not as a player—but as a peanut vendor. Ratan, a young journalism professor and avid Cubs fan, witnesses a violent assault on Ernie during a game and is galvanized into action. What begins as a moment of horror becomes a journey up and down Chicago’s Red Line discovering multiple truths and venturing deeply into the legacy of racism, silence, and survival in America.
Yes, the novel is historical fiction. And, as I learned from Angela (as well as my other instructors: Deborah Johnson, Tom McNeely, Ron Nyren, Dom Russ-Combs), my novel’s genre also has a splash of autofiction. Just as how F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, shared aspects of his Midwestern upbringing and moral compass with the novel’s peripheral narrator, Nick Carraway, in Double Play on the Red Line I share some of my own characteristics with my first-person narrator, Ratan. Perhaps Ratan’s life is the one I did not have the courage to live as a young immigrant finding my way in multi-racial America. The novel’s many doppelgängers explore how each of us might have alternate selves if only...
Back to the Cincinnati wedding. At the reception dinner, after I once more said that I was a writer, a cynical guest sitting to my right looked at Mangla, pointed at me, and smirked, "Yeah, but what does he really do?" First, I mildly protested, but when the stiff pressed on, I said, "I live off of my wife's teacher's pension."
Dr. Rajesh C. Oza is the author of Double Play on the Red Line. To read more about his novel, check out this article in Palo Alto Online and this interview with Bardball. Raj can be reached at satyalogue.com.
My name is Shirin Yim Leos, and I often teach publishing courses for Stanford Continuing Studies. The first of my children’s books, Ruby’s Wish, was about a young girl growing up in old China at a time when girls were not educated. Ruby, however, wants to go to university with her male cousins. Ruby’s grandfather is an unusual man for his times: he not only hears but values her aspiration and does something to help Ruby achieve it.
The book launched in 2002, and was nominated for 21 state and national awards. It won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and was picked as a UNICEF book—2002 being the Year of Girls’ Education. (It’s always a bonus to resonate with the zeitgeist, even though you can’t chase it.)
Twenty-three years and twenty children’s books later, my first adult novel, Of Wind and Dust, was bought at auction this summer and will be published in early 2027. It’s a historical fiction, a braided narrative about three women—one born married, one born a slave, one born free—all married to the same man at the same time in 19th century China and an emerging Seattle; each woman struggling for love and autonomy.
To many, this looked like a big jump, from books of only a few hundred words to one of a hundred thousand. But my first and my latest book beat with the same heart. The grandfather in one is the husband in the other. Both characters are based on my real-life great-great-great-grandfather, Chun Chin Hock, the first Chinese in Seattle, indeed in all of the Washington Territory according to the 1860 census. Growing up, we knew little about him. Only that he had gone to the Gold Mountain and come back very rich, and being rich, taken many wives—at his death, twelve in total.
Among these wives was my great-great-great grandmother, a Native American woman whom the family referred to as The Princess, because she was the daughter of a Puget Sound chief, and whom contemporary newspapers named as Mary Carey, a daughter of Chief Seattle. She was not my great-great-great grandfather’s first wife; he had another in China. And as he’d left home at the age of fifteen, this must have been an arranged marriage—indeed, probably a betrothal from the womb. At one point this first wife, Madam Woo, came to America and took Mary’s sons back to China—which the family thought only proper, because in the Chinese way of life, the first wife was the mother of all her husband’s children. I thought, What the hell must that have been like? It was a few years before Mary was able to follow. She did not long survive in China, and Chun’s bedmate for the rest of his long life was a younger, more junior wife. In several floor plans that the family still possesses, the inhabitants of each bedchamber are marked, and Chun and this wife are always noted as sharing a room.
For most of my adult life, I have wondered about these three women. What emotionally challenging lives they must have had. How constrained they all were by their gender, culture, and their times, and yet, despite these constraints, how remarkable. A Chinese woman making a solo journey to America in the 1870s, at a time when Chinese gentlewomen were not even allowed out of their homes. A Salish woman settling in China, where she could not have spoken one word of the language. A junior wife, wed only to bear sons, who manages to claim and retain the love of her husband. And the backdrops of a China in turmoil after forty years of war and famine, a Salish world in peril, Seattle rising out of the mud, and Hong Kong out of the malarial marsh. And a family that manages to pull itself up, on both sides of the ocean, and survive. And thrive.
On September 25th this year, Publishers Weekly named the sale of Of Wind and Dust to Whitney Frick of Dial Press as their Deal of the Week. The deal was also announced in Publishers Marketplace—according to The Atlantic, “the most coveted screenshot in literature.” It’s exciting, and I hope you will wish me luck. The experience, I can assure you, is going to inform my teaching. Despite having been a publisher for seven years myself, through this experience I am learning something new about the business on a daily basis. But what I will also be able to share, with perhaps renewed conviction, is that it can happen—IT CAN HAPPEN—with luck, with patience, and by keeping your eye on the work.
To learn more about Shirin Yim Leos and her many publications, visit her website.
The Creative Habit: Cultivate a Daily Writing Practice (now closed)
October 29–December 3 | Online
Discover how writing just a little every day can diminish the anxiety of the blank page, spark your creativity, and help form a lasting creative habit.
Beyond Scene: The Secrets to Writing Page-Turning Summary (now closed)
November 8 | On Campus
Learn to create compelling narrative summaries that compress time and convey key information in this immersive, one-day course.
Feature Essays: Raj Oza and Shirin Yim Leos
This fall, we are spotlighting the successes of one student and one of our instructors. Former Novel Writing Certificate student Raj Oza is the author of the newly published Double Play on the Red Line. And beloved, long-time instructor Shirin Yim Leos just sold her debut adult novel at auction, for publication in early 2027. Each has generously shared an essay about some aspect of the book or publication process that they thought students would enjoy hearing about.
Raj Oza
Last summer in Cincinnati, during a multiday wedding celebration, whenever people asked me what I did, I said, "I'm a writer." Pity my wife, Mangla, who had to hear (and hear and hear) the novel's situation and story. After my nth repetition of a far-too-long version of the synopsis that is in my publisher’s press release, Mangla said, "How about you just tell them it's historical fiction." Anyway, that's what I heard her say. Maybe my dear wife was so tired of my pitch that she actually said "hysterical fiction."When I first contemplated writing a novel, I had little idea about which genre would inform the writing.
Before Stanford’s Novel Writing Certificate, while raising a family and tending to my career in Silicon Valley, I had been writing for several decades: book reviews, travel pieces, and a few short stories published here and there. Despite two short story courses at Stanford, I really didn’t have a writing background...I felt like an impostor...a very earnest impostor.
When I slowed down my consulting practice during the COVID pandemic, I tried my hand at long-form fiction. First, I attempted a series of linked short stories set in neighborhoods along Chicago’s elevated train system. When that false start didn’t make it past a few stops on the Red Line, I wrote the first chapters of what evolved into Double Play on the Red Line. That draft was an uneven effort resulting in a less-than-compelling opening and a baggy middle that was heavily dependent on an epistolary relationship. The novel’s ending was out of my grasp.
So, I did what any self-respecting writer might do: I procrastinated by shifting genres and taking a memoir class. It was a terrific class, and perhaps I’ll return to memoir in the new program here at Stanford. But during the middle of that course with John Evans, I learned about the Novel Writing Certificate, applied, and was pleasantly surprised that I was admitted. I was torn between memoir and novel.
I felt that I should proceed with the memoir; my parents were getting old and I worried that the clock might run out on me. But my novel kept calling me, and I knew that I didn’t have the toolkit to complete it to publication. The stakes were high. It was a now-or-never decision around becoming a novelist.
I thought back to college when I worked with my senior thesis advisor. I also considered my doctoral studies when my dissertation chair guided me all the way to the hooding ceremony. The Novel Writing Certificate’s 1:1 tutorial is a similar capstone. My decision was made. I gratefully accepted Stanford’s offer and pivoted to learning how to read, write, and revise a novel.
My first instructor, Angela Pneuman, taught me about in medias res; as a result, one morning at 3:00, in an inspired fever dream, I completely rewrote my opening chapter by jumping right into the action. Angela also partnered with me in our 1:1 tutorial; I like to think of it as an ideal and idea-generating weekly dialogue. That, along with a great deal of encouragement from my writers’ group (we meet most Sundays and call ourselves SOWN—as in Stanford’s Openhearted Writers & Novelists) got Double Play on the Red Line across the finish line and accepted by Third World Press.
It’s a story of injustice, alliance, and hope between two American men of color—one Black, one Indian—bound by a brutal encounter in Wrigley Field’s iconic bleachers. Ernie was poised to become one of the first Black players in the Major Leagues. But on the eve of his historic debut in the 1950s, his life is derailed by a wrongful conviction that steals 16 years from him. When he returns to Wrigley in 1969, it’s not as a player—but as a peanut vendor. Ratan, a young journalism professor and avid Cubs fan, witnesses a violent assault on Ernie during a game and is galvanized into action. What begins as a moment of horror becomes a journey up and down Chicago’s Red Line discovering multiple truths and venturing deeply into the legacy of racism, silence, and survival in America.
Yes, the novel is historical fiction. And, as I learned from Angela (as well as my other instructors: Deborah Johnson, Tom McNeely, Ron Nyren, Dom Russ-Combs), my novel’s genre also has a splash of autofiction. Just as how F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, shared aspects of his Midwestern upbringing and moral compass with the novel’s peripheral narrator, Nick Carraway, in Double Play on the Red Line I share some of my own characteristics with my first-person narrator, Ratan. Perhaps Ratan’s life is the one I did not have the courage to live as a young immigrant finding my way in multi-racial America. The novel’s many doppelgängers explore how each of us might have alternate selves if only...
Back to the Cincinnati wedding. At the reception dinner, after I once more said that I was a writer, a cynical guest sitting to my right looked at Mangla, pointed at me, and smirked, "Yeah, but what does he really do?" First, I mildly protested, but when the stiff pressed on, I said, "I live off of my wife's teacher's pension."
Dr. Rajesh C. Oza is the author of Double Play on the Red Line. To read more about his novel, check out this article in Palo Alto Online and this interview with Bardball. Raj can be reached at satyalogue.com.
Shirin Yim Leos
My name is Shirin Yim Leos, and I often teach publishing courses for Stanford Continuing Studies. The first of my children’s books, Ruby’s Wish, was about a young girl growing up in old China at a time when girls were not educated. Ruby, however, wants to go to university with her male cousins. Ruby’s grandfather is an unusual man for his times: he not only hears but values her aspiration and does something to help Ruby achieve it.The book launched in 2002, and was nominated for 21 state and national awards. It won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and was picked as a UNICEF book—2002 being the Year of Girls’ Education. (It’s always a bonus to resonate with the zeitgeist, even though you can’t chase it.)
Twenty-three years and twenty children’s books later, my first adult novel, Of Wind and Dust, was bought at auction this summer and will be published in early 2027. It’s a historical fiction, a braided narrative about three women—one born married, one born a slave, one born free—all married to the same man at the same time in 19th century China and an emerging Seattle; each woman struggling for love and autonomy.
To many, this looked like a big jump, from books of only a few hundred words to one of a hundred thousand. But my first and my latest book beat with the same heart. The grandfather in one is the husband in the other. Both characters are based on my real-life great-great-great-grandfather, Chun Chin Hock, the first Chinese in Seattle, indeed in all of the Washington Territory according to the 1860 census. Growing up, we knew little about him. Only that he had gone to the Gold Mountain and come back very rich, and being rich, taken many wives—at his death, twelve in total.
Among these wives was my great-great-great grandmother, a Native American woman whom the family referred to as The Princess, because she was the daughter of a Puget Sound chief, and whom contemporary newspapers named as Mary Carey, a daughter of Chief Seattle. She was not my great-great-great grandfather’s first wife; he had another in China. And as he’d left home at the age of fifteen, this must have been an arranged marriage—indeed, probably a betrothal from the womb. At one point this first wife, Madam Woo, came to America and took Mary’s sons back to China—which the family thought only proper, because in the Chinese way of life, the first wife was the mother of all her husband’s children. I thought, What the hell must that have been like? It was a few years before Mary was able to follow. She did not long survive in China, and Chun’s bedmate for the rest of his long life was a younger, more junior wife. In several floor plans that the family still possesses, the inhabitants of each bedchamber are marked, and Chun and this wife are always noted as sharing a room.
For most of my adult life, I have wondered about these three women. What emotionally challenging lives they must have had. How constrained they all were by their gender, culture, and their times, and yet, despite these constraints, how remarkable. A Chinese woman making a solo journey to America in the 1870s, at a time when Chinese gentlewomen were not even allowed out of their homes. A Salish woman settling in China, where she could not have spoken one word of the language. A junior wife, wed only to bear sons, who manages to claim and retain the love of her husband. And the backdrops of a China in turmoil after forty years of war and famine, a Salish world in peril, Seattle rising out of the mud, and Hong Kong out of the malarial marsh. And a family that manages to pull itself up, on both sides of the ocean, and survive. And thrive.
On September 25th this year, Publishers Weekly named the sale of Of Wind and Dust to Whitney Frick of Dial Press as their Deal of the Week. The deal was also announced in Publishers Marketplace—according to The Atlantic, “the most coveted screenshot in literature.” It’s exciting, and I hope you will wish me luck. The experience, I can assure you, is going to inform my teaching. Despite having been a publisher for seven years myself, through this experience I am learning something new about the business on a daily basis. But what I will also be able to share, with perhaps renewed conviction, is that it can happen—IT CAN HAPPEN—with luck, with patience, and by keeping your eye on the work.
To learn more about Shirin Yim Leos and her many publications, visit her website.
If you have writing or publishing news to share, please send it to continuingstudies@stanford.edu so we can feature you in an upcoming issue of the Writer’s Spotlight!