
I write novels, stories, and essays. I hold out hope we can be better humans.
Author: Vanessa Veselka
VANESSA VESELKA is the author of the novel, Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zyzzyva, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist Magazine, and was included in Best American Essays and the FSG 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. Her new novel, The Great Offshore Grounds, is out Aug 25th 2020 on Knopf. She lives in Portland, OR.


The Rust Belt, Lake Erie, and New England – Rest areas, Tall Ships, College towns, Labor Strikes, and Dying at Sea…

The Nebraska Territory – Montana, Wyoming, and The Dakotas…

Van-touring the Internet…or weather, history, and bad ideas.

First Up Against the Wall or exactly how I feel about real estate & private equity moguls who get rich off Medicaid money…

Book release zoom parties, the NBA, and a lost song…

Book Launch, strange anxiety, great fortune and wanting…

The Real Cover…

The Great Offshore Grounds – and organizing unions
