Wendy Mitman Clarke is a writer, reporter and editor. She worked for The Associated Press in northern New England before returning to her home waters in the Chesapeake Bay, where she had spent much of her youth exploring the Sassafras River with her parents on their sailboat. She became Mid-Atlantic bureau chief for Soundings in Annapolis, then went on to Chesapeake Bay Magazine where she reveled in writing about the Bay, its history, environmental issues, and raising two kids as water rats on the family's 34-foot sailboat Luna. She eventually became the magazine's executive editor. In 2001, The Mariners' Museum and the National Parks Gateways project hired her to write a book of essays, which became Window on the Chesapeake, The Bay, Its People and Places (2002, Howell Press and The Mariners' Museum).In 2008 she and her husband, son, and daughter left Annapolis on their 45-foot sailboat Osprey to travel fulltime through the U.S. East Coast, Bahamas, Central America, and western Caribbean. During their journeys, she wrote an award-winning monthly column for Cruising World magazine called "Osprey's Flight," and she remains a contributing editor. When they returned in 2012, she took a position as a staff writer at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where she is now director of media relations. Earning her master's degree at Washington College, she began writing poetry and since has been published in Blackbird, Rattle, and the Delmarva Review. Two of her poems have won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Award (2015 and 2017) and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference twice, studying fiction. She is a regular contributor to Smithsonian.com, and her nonfiction journalism has appeared in Smithsonian, Preservation, and National Parks magazines, in addition to numerous marine and boating publications. In 2002, BOAT/U.S. honored her with the Monk Farnum Award for Excellence in Editorial Commentary, and she has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Maryland, and Boating Writers International. The Chesapeake Bay Magazine story that seeded the idea for this novel, "The Water and Walter Coles," won an Emmart Memorial Award honorable mention, and was published in River Teeth, a journal of creative nonfiction.
