Alena Graedon’s debut 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. It has been translated into eight languages. The New York Times describes the work as “a nervy, nerdy dystopic thriller set in New York City in the very near future,” while The Washington Post lauds it as “A sobering look at how dependent we are on technology and how susceptible we are to the distortions of language.”

Graedon has twice been a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2012 and 2017), and received fellowships at Yaddo, Ucross, The Virginia Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, Guernica, and Post Road among other publications.

A native of Durham, NC, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s M.F.A. program. Her work in progress includes her second novel, about female military pilots of World War II, and Survivalists, a collection of short stories about the many ways in which violence forms and deforms identity. She will be an upcoming fellow at Lighthouse Works, an artists’ residency on Fishers Island.