Kate Wheeler

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kate Wheeler writes fiction, travel journalism, and personal essays. In all three forms, she explores estrangement, delight, human connection, and the navigation of foreign territory inwardly and outwardly. Her most recent publication is “Cave with a View,” an account of her monthlong meditation retreat in a Himalayan cave, published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in summer 2007. For the past two years, she has worked as a lecturer in creative writing at Tufts University.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Wheeler will complete a second novel, narrated by various members of a dysfunctional spiritual community. It takes place in Boston, Thailand, and Bhutan. She is hoping to succeed in defying friends who have said that it is not possible to write a novel about Buddhism.

Wheeler has written a novel, When Mountains Walked (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and a book of short stories, Not Where I Started From (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), and has edited a collection of short fiction, Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction (Wisdom Publications, 2004), and two books of talks by her Burmese meditation teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita of Rangoon. Her work is included in many anthologies, including The Best American Series, for both a short story and travel writing, and Granta 54: “The Best of Young American Novelists.” She has won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two O. Henry Prizes, and a Whiting Award and has been a runner-up for the PEN/Faulkner Award.