Wendy Call is a writer, editor, translator, and educator. She has become something of an itinerant Writer in Residence, in 2013 at Everglades National Park, in 2012 at Joshua Tree and North Cascades National Parks, and in 2011 at Cornell College of Iowa, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park of Vermont, and The Studios of Key West. She has also been Writer in Residence at a dozen other institutions, including the New College of Florida (2010), Seattle University (2009) and Seattle's Richard Hugo House (2006-2008).

Wendy’s narrative nonfiction book, No Word for Welcome (University of Nebraska Press), won Grub Street's 2011 National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the 2012 International Book Award for Best History / Political Book. 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 Institute of Current World Affairs and Oberlin College Alumni Association, supported the research and writing of the book.

She co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (Plume/Penguin) with Mark Kramer. Telling True Stories, an anthology of writing advice from some of the country’s best-known writers of nonfiction, is currently used as a core text in university courses throughout the United States, as well as in a dozen other countries.

Her nonfiction writing and her translations (from Spanish) of poetry and fiction have appeared in more than sixty magazines and literary journals, and in several anthologies. In many publications her photographs accompany her writing. In 2012, with an Artist Support Residency from Seattle's Jack Straw Studios, Wendy recorded a trilingual audio CD of her English translations of poems with Zapotec-Mexican poet Irma Pineda.

She co-coordinated a three-day gathering of indigenous Mexican women writers with Irma Pineda and Sandra Cisneros in 2011. One of her current writing projects, a cycle of essays on grief and loss, is supported by grants from the American Antiquarian Society, Artist Trust, and the arts and culture commissions of the City of Seattle and King County.

She is currently on the faculty of Goddard College's low-residency BFA in Creative Writing, in Plainfield, Vermont. She has also taught creative writing in venues including literary centers, writers' conferences, newsrooms in the United States and Mexico, public libraries, community centers, public high schools, city parks, and county jails. In 2008 she worked with a team of writers and publishing industry professionals to design and present Artist Trust's Literary EDGE program, an annual professional development program for writers throughout Washington State.

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 math teacher and a career Navy officer from rural Michigan, Wendy spent her childhood on and around military bases in Florida, Pennsylvania, southern California, and southern Maryland. She has lived in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood since 2005.