Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California, the author of The Death Class, and a professor in the Literary Journalism Department at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Wired, Slate, and others. She has been a 2021-22 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow and a 2018 Alicia Patterson Fellow and received awards from the Association of Sunday Feature Editors, the Society for Features Journalism, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. She is the mother of a daughter and twin boys (who are monozygotic, or identical--but not).