Christa Fraser currently teaches with the Merritt Writing Program at UC Merced. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a fiction fellow at both MacDowell and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. From 2014 to early 2020, she was a fiction and creative nonfiction instructor for the International Writing Program's (IWP) six-week Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which typically included between 5,000 and 12,000 participants from around the globe. Through partnerships with the IWP and the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, she has also taught six-week young writers' Fiction and Creative Nonfiction courses for several U.S. Embassies. Her work has been published in The Missouri Review and Shankpainter. Currently, she is working on a novel. She is also the former fiction and multimedia editor at River Styx magazine and was a co-founder and former Co-Editor-in-Chief of the longtime California outdoor publication, Adventure Sports Journal. Like her ancestors for many generations, she was born and raised in the Central Valley and Central Foothills of California, where she  has  deep  roots.  She also calls the state's Central Coast home.