Wendy Call (she/her) is a nonfiction writer, literary translator, editor, and educator. 

Wendy Call is author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome. She is co-editor of the craft anthology Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and the new, annual Best Literary Translations anthology. She has translated three collections of poetry by Indigenous Mexican poets. She was a Winter 2023 fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and Fall 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. Working as an editor and educator, Wendy lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.

ABOUT WENDY

Wendy Call (she/her) is a writer, editor, translator, and educator. She is the author of the book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (Nebraska, 2011), winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the International Latino Book Award for Best Historical / Political Book. She also published the creative nonfiction chapbook Tilled Paths Through Wilds of Thought in 2012, as part of a series of artist residencies she completed in U.S. National Parks. Her narrative nonfiction, essays, and other creative nonfiction have appeared in fifty journals and magazines, including Guernica, Georgia Review, Latin American Literature Today, LitHub, Orion, and Witness, as well as in several anthologies.

As a Spanish-to-English translator, Wendy has published the trilingual poetry collections In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (Pluralia, 2022) and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater (Deep Vellum, 2024), both by Mexican-Binnizá poet Irma Pineda. She is also co-translator of a trilingual collection of poems by Mexican-Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez, How to be a Good Savage and Other Poems (Milkweed, 2024). Her translations of poetry and short fiction have appeared in more than eighty magazines and literary journals, including Kenyon Review online, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry, and World Literature Today.

She created Sqebedsed Stories, an interactive literary map of Seattle’s Seward Park and various audio and video essays, and co-produced a radio feature about Indigenous poetry and hiphop, “You Will Not See Me Die,” for Australian Public Radio. She is currently writing a book about sense of place and completing a book of essays about grief and loss.

Her literary projects have been supported by Seattle’s city, county, and statewide arts commissions. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry Translation. Wendy is part of the creative nonfiction faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program.

She has served as writer in residence at more than two dozen institutions, including five national parks, five universities, a historical archive, a visual arts center, and a public hospital. She lives in Southeast Seattle, on unceded Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca City, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.