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 and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, the Atavist and was included in Best American Essays and the 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.