Skip to main content

Chelsea Bieker

Biography

Chelsea Bieker

Chelsea Bieker is the author of the debut novel GODSHOT, which was a finalist for both the Oregon and California Book Award, longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and named a Barnes and Noble Pick of the Month. Her story collection, HEARTBROKE, is a New York Times “Best California Book of 2022”, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the California Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Cut, Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, No Tokens, Electric Literature and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, as well as residencies from MacDowell and Tin House Books. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.

Chelsea Bieker

Books by Chelsea Bieker

Heartbroke
by Chelsea Bieker - Fiction, Short Stories, Women's Fiction

United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California’s Central Valley, the characters of HEARTBROKE boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny.

Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker - Fiction

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where 14-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. But then Lacey May’s mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves her daughter and runs off with a man she barely knows. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes.