
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, The Great Offshore Grounds, long listed for the 2020 National Book Award and winner of the Ken Kesey Award (OBA), and debut, Zazen, which won the 2012 PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zyzzyva, and her nonfiction in NYT, GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and Bitch Magazine. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a musician, a train-hopper, a night cabbie, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, OR.


A Defense of Imbalance
The Kindness of the Winds of Fortune…

US 395, Joshua Tree, Ghosts and Bad Things to Do in the Desert, and the Southern Route…

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…
