Emily Wortman-Wunder

Emily Wortman-Wunder has degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Colorado and Colorado State University. She has written for Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Brain, Child, and Montana Outdoors; her award-winning fiction has appeared in the Colorado Review, Ontario Review, Seed Science Magazine, West Branch, and the North American Review. Her work has won awards in the Atlantic Monthly's Student Writing Contest and NAR's Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Best New American Voices Award. "A central obsession in my work is the relationship between humans and nature, either via the formal relationship we have tried to set up through the conducting of scientific study, or through science's bastard stepchild, natural resource management. Both, of course, are predicated on the assumption that the relationship is simple and determined primarily by us: humans do the studying and the managing, and nature gets studied. Most people who actually work with nature suspect it is not so simple; there is the sense, as the narrator of my story "Bear" describes, of trespassing, and also of needing to give something of yourself. How much of this relationship can we control or even understand? That's one of the founding questions of my novel-in-progress. There are also the complications on the human side of scientific study, as I poke fun at in "The Life History of the Four-Foot Moth." Finally, as a brief glance at the samples I have provided shows, I am constantly exploring the boundaries of form, the different types of narrative we use to explain ourselves and the ways those narratives can betray or reveal."