Tanya Žilinskas is a first generation American and forever Californian. Her fiction is defined by the submerged psychological drives of its characters and defamiliarized domestic environments. She’s interested in subverting the expectations put on female characters, especially with regards to motherhood, aging, and behavior in polite society.

She is querying a novel about early internet hoaxes, the complexities of female friendship, and the elusive shape of memory. She is also revising a California Gothic novel-in-stories set in a surreal version of Marin County.

Tanya’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, Porter House Review, The Florida Review, Meetinghouse, Lunch Ticket, The Bureau Dispatch, X-R-A-Y, Mumber Mag, and Atticus Review. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50.

Her writing has received support from Writing By Writers, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Desert Nights, Rising Stars, and the University of San Francisco. Tanya is a reader for Electric Literature’s The Commuter and the former editor-in-chief of Invisible City. She earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco, where she was awarded a post-graduate teaching fellowship and currently works as an adjunct professor.