Ilana Debare

Ilana Debare is an Oakland author who worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee and co-founded the Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland in 1999. She is the author of the 2004 book Where Girls Come First: The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Revival of Girls’ Schools and two novels: Shaken Loose about a college dropout who finds herself in a traditional Christian Hell that she didn’t know existed, and its 2025 sequel Shaken Free which documents what happens when she returns.