Kathleen Wheaton grew up in California, studied at Stanford and received an MFA from Boston University. She was a librarian at the New Yorker and then worked for 25 years as a journalist and travel writer in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Bethesda, Maryland. Her collection, Aliens and Other Stories, received the 2013 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, and she served as president of the press from 2014 to 2022. She is a 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, where she is at work on a second story collection and a novel.