Colin Winnette

press release: A Room of One's Own is happy to welcome Colin Winnette, author of the chilling, Gothic horror story of adolescence, The Job of the Wasp! Colin will be joined by Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, for a conversation about the book following the reading.

Colin Winnette is the author of Revelation (Mutable Sound), Animal Collection (Spork), Fondly (Atticus Books), Coyote (Les Figues), and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio). His novels have been translated into Italian and French. His latest novel, The Job of the Wasp, is now available from Soft Skull Press.

His prizes include Les Figues Press's NOS Book Contest, the Sonora Review’s 2012 Short Short Fiction Contest, and Heavy Feather Review’s Featured Chapbook Contest in 2014. Colin was also a runner-up for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award and a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Playboy, Lucky Peach, The Believer, and others.

About The Job of the Wasp: A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school’s dark heart. And that’s when the corpses start turning up.

A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and a murder mystery all in one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence.