Vanessa Veselka
Vanessa Veselka (born March 14, 1969) is an American writer best known for her 2020 novel "The Great Offshore Grounds", which won the Oregon Book Award and was longlisted for the U.S. National Book Award. She is also the author of the PEN / Robert W. Bingham prize prize-winning novel "Zazen", and her nonfiction has appeared in Salon, The Atlantic, GQ, Maximum Rock'n'Roll, Bitch Magazine, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and The American Reader. In 2013, she was a chosen as a MacDowell Fellow, and her November 2012 GQ piece entitled "The Truck Stop Killer" is part of the 2013  edition of Best American Essays. Personal life. Veselka's bio says she has been "a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, and a student of paleontology." In the 1990s she played in the bands Bell and The Pinkos and ran a record label. She graduated from Reed College and lives in Portland, Oregon. Writing. Veselka's novel "Zazen" was serialized online by "Arthur Magazine", then published by Richard Nash's imprint Red Lemonade. The book grew out of a short story published by Tin House in 2010, and was nominated for a Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and  awarded the $25,000 PEN/Bingham award "for a debut work of fiction that represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise." Her nonfiction has dealt with issues of women, violence and the road ("Green Screen," The Truck Stop Killer") as well as rape, mental health ("The Collapsible Woman") and unionization ("the Wake of Protest"). Her fiction frequently involves "Buddhist concerns" and geological themes. Her new novel, "The Great Offshore Grounds" was released on August 25, 2020 from Knopf.