Lou Mathews lives in Los Angeles below the Hollywood sign and is a fourth generation Angeleno. Married at 19, he worked his way through UC Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic and continued to work as a mechanic until he was 39. Since then he has worked as a freelance journalist, restaurant reviewer, and contributing editor at L.A. Style magazine. His journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Tin House, Mother Jones, and many other outlets-from underground newspapers and airline magazines to corporate house organs like Bob's Big Boy Family News. Mathews has published short stories in more than forty literary quarterlies, including the New England Review, Short Story, Witness, ZYZZYVA, and seven issues of Black Clock. The stories have been included in more than ten fiction anthologies and two textbook series. He has received a Pushcart Prize, two Pushcart Special Mentions, A Best American Mystery Stories Special Mention, A Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as a California Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowships. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program since 1989 and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards. L.A. Breakdown, Mathews' first novel, was published in 1999, when he was 53, and it was picked as a Best Book of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. His latest novel, Shaky Town, published last year, was long-listed for the 2022 Tournament-of-Books.