Vanessa Veselka

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel The Great Offshore Grounds, which won the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction  and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award and the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, OR.