Christina Hoag was a former journalist for the Miami Herald and the Associated Press who's had her laptop searched by Colombian guerrillas and phone tapped in Venezuela, suspected of drug trafficking in Guyana, hid under a car to evade Guatemalan soldiers, an d posed as a nun to get inside a Caracas jail. She's interviewed gang members, bank robbers, gunmen, thieves and thugs in prisons, shantytowns and slums, not to forget billionaires and presidents, some of whom fall into the previous categories. Now she writes about such characters in her fiction. Her debut novel "Skin of Tattoos," a noir crime novel, was a finalist for the 2017 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Suspense. Her YA thriller "Girl on the Brink" was named Suspense Magazine’s Best of 2016 YA. She also writes nonfiction, co-authoring Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence (Turner Publishing, 2014), a groundbreaking book on violence intervention used in several universities. She has had numerous short stories, creative nonfiction essays and poems published in literary journals including Shooter (UK), San Antonio Review, Round Table Literary Journal, Santa Barbara Literary Journal and Lunch Ticket, and won Honorable Mentions for essay and short story in the International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Literary Justice 2020 contest and for essay and novel excerpt in the Soul-Making Keats Writing Competition 2020. Fluent in Spanish and French, Christina grew up as an expat around the world. She lives in Los Angeles where she has taught creative writing at a maximum-security prison and to at-risk teen girls in South and East Los Angeles. She A regular speaker at writing conferences and groups, bookstores and libraries, she volunteers as a trained domestic violence support group facilitator and is a public speaker about DV.