Vanessa Veselka

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her work has been published in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tin House, Zyzzyva and in Best American Essays. 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, and her second novel The Offshore Grounds is out now from Knopf.