Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn is an American author. Her short story collection How to Wrestle a Girl was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 2022 and her debut novel Dead in Long Beach, California was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is known for writing flash fiction and her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's and The Paris Review.