Wendy Call

Wendy Call is a writer, editor, translator, and teacher of creative writing. She is author of the book No Word for Welcome, winner of the 2011 Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction, and co-editor of the 2007 anthology Telling True Stories. She has served as writer in residence at more than a dozen institutions, including Harborview Medical Center, New College of Florida, Richard Hugo House, Seattle University, and several national parks. In 2013, she also contributed to Midge Raymond’s Everyday Marketing: Promotion Ideas to Fit Your Regularly Scheduled Life.

Wendy received 2012 GAP Award funding to take a one-week writing retreat at the University of Washington’s Whiteley Center. The week will be spent on completion of cycle of 12works of short nonfiction about grief and death – each work in a different form of literary nonfiction (e.g. memoir, list essay, personal essay, collage essay, lyric essay, abecedarium, etc). This creative act was inspired by her experiences as caregiver to the author’s mother after a terminal cancer diagnosis and close friends’ challenges and need to share similar losses and discuss their own isolation and pain. Once she has full drafts of all 12essays from Grief’s Hidden Gifts, she will complete the residency and begin submitting them to 50 literary journals and magazines for possible publication.

Wendy received 2009 GAP Award funding to cover living expenses in order for her to work full-time on the revisions to No Word for Welcome, a creative nonfiction work. Her book is composed of the stories of a gay Zapotec man, a young Ikoots preschool teacher, and a Huave fisherman and questions what inspires people to organize themselves into movements for social change. Wendy’s work is framed by her own experiences, living and working for more than three years in a place, culture, and ecology that were very different from her own.

Wendy received 2006 GAP Award funding to help cover the expense of travel and research for her book entitled No Word for Welcome. Her non-fiction, narrative writing revolves around border crossings and the movement of people and money. This book focuses on the lives of three residents from Native villages in a region of southern Mexico called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and follows their lives as they grapple with the economic, cultural, and personal impacts of economic globalization.