I’ve been obsessed with stories for a long time, from my early years in New Orleans to my school years in Winchester, Virginia, the small town my family moved to after my mother and I were shot by a stranger when I was four. But like the protagonist Anna Rose Watson of ANNA’S ENDLESSLY COLLAPSING STAR, I was initially a math and science geek, with dreams of working in astrophysics. Math was seductive to me. I was a child raised in chaos, and math class offered me the opportunity to turn chaos into order. Five class periods a week, for twelve years. Yet, in creative writing classes I found another way to tame the chaos. When it was time to go to college, I chose words because math wasn’t enough. Even physics wasn’t enough. I needed to understand the universe in a way that I (personally) couldn’t do with numbers. If I was going to save myself from breaking apart, I needed words.
I went to the College of William and Mary and received my B.A. in English. I became the fiction editor of The William and Mary Review, one of the only national literary journals staffed entirely by undergraduates. In the summers I taught creative writing workshops to kids at the public library in Winchester where I’d spent so many hours as a kid. (A library similar in vibes to the much smaller library run by Harold Plum, the father of Anna’s best friend Willie in my novel.) Later I earned my M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University, where I was the fiction editor of So to Speak. The first draft of ANNA’S ENDLESSLY COLLAPSING STAR was my graduate thesis.
I’m a freelance writer and editor. Over the past two decades, I’ve been based in the Washington, D.C. area. In 2025, I co-founded the online magazine WashingtonUnbound.com, where I am the fiction and nonfiction editor. We publish reviews of D.C. area authors, interviews, and more. Previously I spent five years as the Local Authors editor of online magazine DCTRENDING. Over the years I also taught composition at Northern Virginia Community College; interned for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation; served as the communications specialist for local theater arts company CARE Actor; and interned for allAfrica Global Media as their book review editor; and helped to start the alternative newspaper The Washington Spark.
You can read about my personal story in more depth, but the cliff notes version goes like this. I was four years old when my mother and I were shot by a stranger in broad daylight on a busy street in New Orleans, in front of the public library we patronized every Saturday. My mother threw her body on top of mine, shielding me from the worst. I have no permanent physical injuries, but my mother was hit in the spine and paralyzed from the neck down. She lived as a quadriplegic for 20 years, confined to a wheelchair and requiring 24/7 care, before finally succumbing to her injuries. Everything in my life has been shaped by that day. And so, I write.
I write because I have to. I come from a place you only leave after you’ve been forged in some kind of fire. It’s a surprisingly useful place to come from. Suffering makes you tough. Trauma gives you character and empathy (if you’re lucky), and certainly provides lots of inspiration for fiction and poetry. But you have to leave the fire, to survive.
And I write because I have hope. I write for tomorrow, because it’s not just promised, it always comes. I’ve published articles, op-eds, and essays on politics, parenting, and being a human in The Washington Post, Healthline, Memoir Magazine (where I won an essay contest), OtherWords, and Scary Mommy, among others. My book reviews, interviews, and arts journalism have appeared in publications including The Washington Independent Review of Books, and Tottenville Review. And I’ve published short fiction and poetry in The Washington Writers Publishing House’s anthology This Is What America Looks Like, The Nassau Review, Agave Magazine, and Stymie, among others. ANNA’S ENDLESSLY COLLAPSING STAR was a finalist for the 2022 Eludia Award and was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. For my work with DCTRENDING I was a finalist for a Washington, D.C., Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists 2023 Dateline Award.
I live with my husband and son in the D.C. area. We will soon be relocating to Dusseldorf, Germany. I’ll pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature at Heinrich Heine University, while writing my next two novels and continuing in my current role as co-editor of Washington Unbound.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Norah Vawter’s Anna’s Endlessly Collapsing Star in 2028.
