Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. She also worked as a research assistant on the book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Her fiction can be found in places that include Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), Terrain as winner of the 2024 Editor’s Prize, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America and The Best Small Fictions 2019. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches in Milwaukee and is represented by Stephanie Delman at Trellis Literary Management. For film/TV, she is represented by Hilary Zaitz Michael at WME.
Gold Chain is about love and theft. These stories catch women who steal: gold necklaces, Pez Dispensers, nail polish, pens, grapes, memories, love, time. These stories spin obsessively around questions of womanhood, addiction, capitalism, and modern-day feminine survival, ultimately asking if our desires as women are even our own.