In Mansfield Studio at MacDowell Colony; photo by Jo Eldredge Morrissey
Paula Whyman's first word was "book." She is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council grant in fiction, awards for short fiction including the Virgin Fiction award, and the American University’s Myra Sklarew Thesis Award for a novel. She was recently awarded a Fellowship to Yaddo, and she is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA). Her work appears in
The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2012 issue, and in the current issue of
Schaum, an arts journal published in Rostock, Germany. Her work is also included in the anthology,
Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review (Spring 2008, Ivan R. Dee);
Gargoyle; the
Delmarva Review;
Bethesda Magazine;
North Dakota Quarterly; the
Virgin Fiction anthology (1998, Morrow/Weisbach); and
Gravity Dancers, an anthology edited by Richard Peabody (June 2009, Paycock Press). One of her stories was recently reprinted by
Redux, the online journal.
Ms. Whyman's commentary has been featured on
National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Her humor essays have appeared in the
Washington Post’s Style and Food sections, and the Sunday magazine.
She's a visiting writer for the Pen/Faulkner Foundation's Writers in Schools program in Washington, DC, and The Hudson Review's Writers in Schools/College Now program in New York. Her fiction is part of the curriculum at The Young Women's Leadership School in Harlem. She has led literature classes at Politics & Prose, the independent bookstore in Washington, DC.
She created and wrote the weekly column,
Semi-Charmed Life: Surviving at the Center of the Universe, which was featured on
Bethesda Magazine's website. Ms. Whyman is also the creator and editor of
Bethesda World News, an online parody newspaper.
Her guest blogs have appeared on sites such as Madam Mayo, Leslie Pietrzyk's Work-in-Progress blog, Stephen Elliot's The Rumpus (mini-interviews), and Susan Coll's Alternate Sides.
Ms. Whyman was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. Before attending graduate school, she was a book development editor with the American Psychological Association, as well as a corporate underling, a bar-back, a meeting planner, an editor of cheesy real estate guides, a clerk in a custom T-shirt and gag emporium, a camp counselor, and a Solid Gold dancer. She has always been a writer.
