Marléne Zadig is a writer of the West. She was born on an army base in Monterey, grew up in the Navy town of San Diego, and came of age in Northern California, though she now resides with her three kids, two cats, and a dog far from home in the D.C. metropolitan area. She learned how to fly before she could drive and really misses those days.

She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland in 2012, and her unpublished story collection manuscript was named a finalist for the 2018 New American Fiction Prize. Her literary writing tends toward darkly humorous literary fiction, and she is currently an editor and reporter at the local newspaper, the Hyattsville Life & Times, where her education journalism recently received national recognition in the National Newspaper Association’s 2024 Better Newspaper Contest in the Best Education/Literacy Story category.

She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize and storySouth Million Writers Award nominee, a runner-up for the 2017 Literary Awards at The Pinch, the 2016 StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Fulton Prize for Short Fiction, a 2015 Best of the Net finalist, a winner of Carve Magazine's first annual Blog Contest. She should have been a professional musician (and still might).