Kathleen Wheaton

Kathleen Wheaton was born in Frankfurt, Germany and grew up in California. She majored in English and Spanish at Stanford University and later received an MFA from Boston University. She is married to NPR reporter David Welna and they have two sons. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese and works as an interpreter of those languages for the Montgomery County public school system. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.Kathleen Wheaton’s first collection of short stories, Aliens and Other Stories, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in 2013 and will appear in October of this year. Her short stories have appeared in Narrative, New South, the Baltimore Review, Flyway, and other publications, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (Norton, 2005) and Amazing Graces (Paycock Press 2012). She has been awarded three grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and has received awards from the Baltimore Review and Redbook and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.Kathleen has also won two Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Awards for profiles of public radio host Diane Rehm and mezzo soprano Denyce Graves. Both articles were published in Bethesda Magazine. She has lived and worked as a journalist in Madrid, San Sebastian, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Tepoztlan, Mexico, and has published articles and interviews in The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, The Paris Review, Town & Country, and Smithsonian.