Wendy Oleson

Wendy Oleson is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks, Please Find Us (Gertrude Press) and Please Find Us (Map Literary). Her stories and poems have appeared in dozens of venues, including Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Copper Nickel, SmokeLong Quarterly: Best of the First Ten Years, and the 2018 Best of the Net anthology. Wendy serves as associate prose editor for Fairy Tale Review and teaches online for the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. She is a freelance writer and editor with projects ranging from academic journals to true-crime TV scripts. She has a BA from Amherst College, an MFA from Oregon State, and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. Wendy lives with her wife in Walla Walla, WA, where she is at work on a story collection and a novel about the child star of a cursed horror movie franchise.

Wendy received 2019 GAP Award funding to attend a writing residency and revise a manuscript of fractured, frustrated, and queered coming-of-age stories. The stories blend realism with surrealism and fabulism to provide the collection stylistic variety alongside thematic coherence. The autofictional text, “Are You a Good Girl or a Bad Girl?” positions the narrator within Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and gives the collection its name.

Artist Trust thanks the Amazon Literary Partnership for underwriting this award through Artist Trust’s Corporate Partnership program. For information about supporting Washington State artists, visit here.