Lisa Wartenberg Vélez is a Colombian-born writer of fiction who split her childhood between South Florida and Bogotá. She is a newly-minted MFA graduate from the prestigious Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where she was 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. She has or will receive creative and/or financial support from Ucross Foundation, Tin House Summer Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

 

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 held a fellowship at 9thWonder Agency and served as Assistant Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. 

 

A lifelong storyteller, she also 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.