Wendy Besel Hahn recently relocated from the Metro Washington D.C. area to Denver, Colorado, closer to her roots. Although living near the nation’s capital for 22 years increased her passion for political writing, she is a Westerner at heart: born in Idaho, raised in Utah and Colorado. Her childhood involved doing triple-lutz jumps on the shag carpet in the living room that made the turntable’s needle skip on her parents’ John Denver records. She is most interested in how geography, religion, and historical events shape characters, both in fiction and nonfiction.

After earning an MFA from George Mason University, she attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a nonfiction contributor in 2016. She has also served as a panelist at Fall for the Book and Gaithersburg Book Festival. She is the nonfiction editor for Furious Gravity: Vol. IX in Grace and Gravity Series, founded by Richard Peabody and edited by Melissa Scholes Young. Her work appears in The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, Redivider, Sojourners, and elsewhere.