About

Welcome. My name is Christine Lee Zilka, and I spend my time writing, reading, obsessing about my wiener dogs, running, backpacking and doing yoga on a semi-regular basis, baking, cooking (and eating), and traveling. I also happen to be a stroke survivor (in stroke speak: left thalamic stroke 12/31/06, caused by a PFO, closed June 2007). Blog posts here will likely range along those topics.

Contact:
follow @czilka on twitter
or email me at christine DOT zilka AT gmail DOT com

My official bio:

I am the Editor-at-Large at Kartika Review. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as ZYZZYVA, Verbsap, Yomimono, and Men Undressed: Women Authors Write About Male Sexual Experience. I was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook in 2006, placed as a finalist in Poets and Writers Magazine’s Writers Exchange Contest in 2007, and received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open in 2009.

I earned my undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and my MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. In addition to writing short stories, I have a novel in progress.

My honest writer bio:

Christine works at a dining room table surrounded by piles of teaching materials and student papers that need constant grading and she writes with a needy geriatric wiener dog who smells like corn chip Fritos on her lap and another needy wiener dog with feral survival tendencies who is up to no good somewhere in the kitchen. She dotes on her husband who dotes on her and together they get through her sporadic writing self esteem troughs that sometimes attack daily and sometimes leave her alone for weeks. She should be running and exercising, but instead she is baking cookies and eating them. By herself. In front of her laptop. Trying to revise her novel. She is very pale.

You can also find me on a food blog called Muffin Top that I share with friends.

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Creative Writing

• “Bile” ZYZZYVA, Fall 2003
• “Just A Little Feeling Verbsap, May 2005
• “It’s Been Way Too Long” Yomimono, Spring 2010
• “Erasure” Men Undressed: Women Authors Write About Male Sexual Experience, Other Voices/DZANC Books, October 2011

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Articles

• Conversation with Nami Mun, an interview – Kartika Review Fall/Winter 2009
• Conversation with Chang-rae Lee, an interview – Kartika Review Fall/Winter 2009
• Conversation with Peter Ho Davies, an interview – Kartika Review Spring/Summer 2009
• Conversation with Alexander Chee, an interview – Kartika Review Fall/Winter 2008
• Conversation with Randa Jarrar, an interview – Kartika Review Fall/Winter 2008
• Conversation with Yiyun Li, an interview – Kartika Review Summer 2008
• “Alienated” an opinion essay– asia! Magazine 2007
• “The Writing Cage” a feature – asia! Magazine 2006
• “Ramen Around the World” a feature – asia! Magazine 2006
• “The Jewish Mermaid” a feature – asia! Magazine 2006