Follow her on twitter @erikahayasaki

Erika Hayasaki's feature stories and essays have appeared in Wired, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, The California Sunday Magazine, Glamour, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nine years as a staff metro reporter, education writer, and New York-based national correspondent. 

Her work has also appeared in digital publications devoted to nonfiction feature storytelling, including Matter, The Big Roundtable, Narratively, Longreads, and Zocalo Public Square, and she is the author of two bestselling Amazon Kindle Singles (e-books), Dead or Alive (2012), and Drowned by Corn (2014), which is also available in Japanese.

In 2014, she published her first book, The Death Class: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster), which has been featured in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, on NPR, MSNBC, USA Today, and others. The Death Class has been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Polish.

Erika teaches courses in nonfiction storytelling, digital longform, and science and medical narrative writing at the University of California, Irvine, where she is an associate professor in the Literary Journalism Program, an undergraduate degree program dedicated to studying and practicing narrative journalism.

She has won awards from the Association of Sunday Feature Editors for her Los Angeles Times Magazine profile, "The Daughter," and from the Society for Features Journalism for her digital story, "The Girl Who Wouldn't Die." She has received the Los Angeles Times Best Writing award for her stories about a new teacher's plight, a boy's dangerous journey to school and a cultural divide at a high school. She is a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Breaking News Award, and has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award, including in 2008 for her reconstruction of the Virginia Tech shootings inside of a French class.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their daughter.