Lisa Wartenberg Vélez is a Colombian-born writer of fiction who split her childhood between Florida and Bogotá. She is an MFA candidate ('23) in the prestigious Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellow and a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar. Her work can be found in Nimrod International Journal and Moot Point Journal. It has received creative support from Tin House Summer Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow residency.

 

She is the recipient of the 2021 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers and the 2022 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Fiction, and finalist for both the 2022 Passages North Waasnode Fiction Prize and the Master's Review Anthology XI. Her debut short story was named a winner of the 2023 PEN / Robert J Dau Prize, and will be anthologized in Best Debut Short Stories 2023 (Catapult Books). 

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In addition, Lisa is a copywriting fellow at 9thWonder and has served as Assistant Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. 

 

She has degrees in theatre, from New York University (BA) and the University of Houston (MFA), which she taught at Rice University, University of Houston, and others. 

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She now lives in Houston with her family.