BROADCASTS.com

b'Chas Smith the author of Cocaine + Surfing and Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell (It Books, November 2013), which was optioned for television by Fox 21 (Homeland and Sons of Anarchy) with producers at Television 360 (Game of Thrones) and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction.\\n\\nChas began his writing career as a foreign correspondent, penning pieces for Vice, Paper, and Blackbook, amongst others, from Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Azerbaijan and Colombia which led to a brief career as a war correspondent for Current TV.\\n\\nAfter being kidnapped by Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war he transitioned to surf journalism where he was a featured writer at the brash Stab before becoming Editor at Large at Surfing Magazine. There he developed a reputation as the most controversial voices in the space. Matt Warshaw, author of the Encyclopedia of Surfing, calls him, \\u201cBright and hyper-ironic.\\u201d William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days, says that Chas, \\u201c\\u2026calls it like he sees it and in surfing that\\u2019s not usually the case.\\u201d\\n\\nChas Smith is the co-owner of a surf website, BeachGrit.\\n\\nJoe Donnelly is an award-winning journalist and the author of L.A. Man. His short story \\u201cBonus Baby\\u201d, published in the spring/summer 2015 issue of Zyzzyva, is featured in the 2016 O. Henry Prize Stories Collection as one of the 20 best short stories of the year. His short story \\u201c50 Minutes\\u201c, co-authored with Harry Shannon, was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories, 2012 and was recently made into a short film starring Stephen Tobolowsky and DJ Qualls. \\u201cThe Lone Wolf", written for Orion, was a 2013 longreads.com editor\\u2019s pick and a 2014 Pen Center USA Literary Awards Finalist for Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, Huck, Orion, The Surfer\\u2019s Journal, Washington Post, and other publications.\\n\\nDonnelly co-founded and co-edited Slake: Los Angeles, the acclaimed journal of long-form journalism, fiction, essay, poetry, photography and art. Slake made a dozen appearances on the Los Angeles Times\\u2018 bestsellers list and work appearing in Slake earned numerous awards and recognitions, including multiple Best American series selections, Livingston Award finalists, PEN USA finalists, LA Press Club awards, Franco-American Foundation\\u2019s Excellence in Immigration Reporting First Prize, and more. In 2014, Rare Bird Books published We Dropped A Bomb On You: The Best of Slake, I-IV.\\n\\nFrom 2002-2008, Donnelly was the deputy editor of LA Weekly. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College.'