Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Vanessa Veselka is the author of a novel, Zazen, which has been selected for many Best Novels of the Year lists in 2011 as well as a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her fiction has been in Tin House Magazine, YETI, and Le Zaporogue. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Seattle Weekly, Arthur Magazine, Bust, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, and has been anthologized in the FSG collection, Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism.
"Often, authors fall into two distinct camps: those who write gorgeous sentences, but who can’t spin conflict-driven yarns, direct storytelling taking a backseat to narrative navel-gazing; on the other side are the ones who emphasize plot, building much more filmic stories, yet those authors never take the time to make each sentence stand on their own as pieces of art. The lucky few are able to do both of these things simultaneously—think Denis Johnson, John Fante, Lynda Barry—and Veselka is one of thEM. —Joshua Mohr / The Rumpus
"Veselka's prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations." — Publisher’s Weekly