Photo credit: Jim Gensheimer

I am a magnet for ghosts—bothersome spirits, casual travelers, desperate souls—invited and uninvited, familiar faces and strangers alike.

I am a historian drawn to storytelling that lifts voices silenced and lessons still not learned.

I am a mother who has lost a child and risen from the ashes of unassailable grief.

I have kept my stories close.

Until now...

J. E. Weiner is a writer and novelist based in Northern California. Her debut novel, The Wretched and Undone, a searing Southern Gothic tale set in the Texas Hill Country and inspired by real people and actual events, was released by History Through Fiction in March 2025. The book is a 2026 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award runner-up and Readers’ Choice Award nominee for Best Southern Gothic, a semifinalist for the 2025 Laramie Book Award, which recognizes emerging talent in Western, First Nations, and Americana Fiction, and a 2024 Killer Nashville Top Pick and Claymore Award finalist. Weiner’s creative nonfiction has appeared in the literary journals Madcap Review, Five Minutes, HerStry, and Chicago Story Press, as well as the recent grit lit anthology Red-Headed Writing (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024), and her work was recently shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize for Essays & Nonfiction. Weiner is a founding member of the Pacific Coast Writers Collective, and while she lives and writes in blissful exile on the West Coast, her heart remains bound to her childhood home, the Great State of Texas.