David Kipen is critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and co-founder of the storefront bilingual nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and a contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time at UCLA. His novel The Anniversarist, called by Michael Connelly “great entertainment with knowledge thrown in,” is out to publishers this month. He has written widely about the fiction of Oyster Bay native Thomas Pynchon, and works closely with Rep. Steve Israel on The 21st-Century Federal Writers’ Project.