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Wendy Call is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher of creative writing. She is currently Writer in Residence at Seattle's Richard Hugo House, the country's third-largest literary center. Beginning in September 2008, she will be Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University near Tacoma, Washington, teaching nonfiction writing.

She is also Writer in Residence with Seattle's Writers in the Schools Program, in a Highline District public high school, and a 2008 Fellow in Seattle's Jack Straw Writers Program.

She co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (Plume/Penguin, 2007) with Mark Kramer. Telling True Stories is an anthology of writing advice from some of the country’s best-known writers of nonfiction, including Nora Ephron, Alma Guillermoprieto, Tracy Kidder, and Gay Talese.

Wendy’s narrative nonfiction book-in-progress, No Word for Welcome, explores how economic globalization intersects with village life in a region of southern Mexico called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Grants from the arts commissions of Seattle, King County, and Washington State, as well as the Oberlin College Alumni Association, have supported the research and writing of the book. Wendy was a 2000-2002 Writing Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs in the Mexican isthmus — the setting of No Word for Welcome. She is represented by Wendy Strothman of The Strothman Agency, LLC.

Wendy’s writing has appeared in English, Spanish, and French in more than thirty magazines and literary journals, as well as several anthologies. In many publications her photographs accompany her writing. Wendy has worked as a writer and editor since 2000. Before that, she devoted a decade to work for social change organizations in Boston and Seattle. She holds a BA in biology from Oberlin College and a MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

The daughter of a middle-school teacher and a career Navy officer from rural Michigan, Wendy grew up on and around military bases in Florida, Pennsylvania, southern California, and southern Maryland. She has made her home in Seattle's south end since 2004.

Wendy Call

"Wendy Call writes of global industrialization and makes the reader care. Her characters are sympathetic, their landscape richly described, and their language alive in its quirky, particular richness—a poetry of place."
Barbara Lazear Ascher
Author, Landscape Without Gravity

 

 

Photo above by Aram Falsafi, 2006
Image below (photo transfer onto watercolor paper): View from Sao Bento Monestery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2003