S.L. WISENBERG [seriously funny]

S.L. Wisenberg is the author of four books from university presses. On October 22, 2024 her nonfiction chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, originally published as a hardback by the University of Iowa Press, will come out in paperback from Tortoise Books. Her latest published book is The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, winner of the Juniper Prize in nonfiction, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2023. She's also the author of a short-story collection, The Sweetheart Is In; an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions. She is a fourth-generation Texan who lives in Chicago and edits Another Chicago Magazine. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BSJ from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She was a feature writer for the Miami Herald and has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and many other places.Her anthologized work is in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft,  and a number of other books. For ten years she was co-director of Northwestern's then-MA/MFA in Creative Writing program and was a graduate faculty recipient of a Distinguished Teacher Award. She has been the literary editor of TriQuarterly, the creative nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. and is now the editor of ACM. She's received a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She was the Coal Royalty Chair for a semester at the University of Alabama, teaching in the MFA program. Wisenberg has read her work and lectured at many universities and colleges, including Brown, Creighton, Minnesota State, Texas A&M, University of Tampa, Ripon, and Lafayette. Besides Northwestern, she has taught at DePaul, Roosevelt, Western Michigan, North Park University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is working on a collection of short stories that are pre- and post-Holocaust and have a connection to old movies and Houston. One of these was runner-up in Narrative Magazine's Fall 2021 contest, and another won Narrative's Spring '22 contest. She received an Illinois Arts Council 2023 Fellowship Award for Prose. In October 2023 The Wandering Womb was named a finalist for the CHIRBy (Chicago Review of Books) award in nonfiction.

another mug shot, after putting red stuff on my hair

 "Afew years ago I was lucky enough to be in Paris. I was riding the Metro and was thinking about the similarity between the name of the river and the French word for 'breast.' I came up with an idea for a photo and a caption: "Solange (the name my high school French teacher gave me) sur le Seine sans sein." A photographer friend agreed to take that picture. I've been afraid to show it to anyone. Until now."--"On Being One-Breasted," Chicago Tribune