Born in Pasadena, California, Erica Zora Wrightson has worked as a journalist, writer/editor, and arts administrator for newspapers and magazines, museums, and nonprofits around Los Angeles. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in the L.A. Weekly, L.A. Times, Pasadena Magazine, and Slake: Los Angeles. While pursuing her B.A. in literature and poetry at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, she spent a year in South Africa, studying poetry in Durban and documenting the stories of a group of women in Cape Town living with HIV/AIDS. Her research interests include regional cuisines, ethnomusicology, and narrative medicine.