Alena Graedon's first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus, Electric Literature, and Tor. It has been translated into eight languages. Graedon’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, VICE, Southern Indiana Review, and Southern Humanities Review, and her nonfiction has been published in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Tablet, and Guernica, among other publications.
Graedon has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, and The Vermont Studio Center. A native of North Carolina, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's M.F.A. program.
At MacDowell in 2012, she worked on the final revisions of her first novel, then provisionally titled Dead Letters. During her 2017 residency, she completed a novella (part of her short story collection, "Survivalist") which she anticipated finishing later that year.
