Liesl Wilke
Book Writer & Co-Lyricist
Liesl is a New Jersey-born and southern-raised author of novels, short stories, screenplays and stageplays. She has a Sociology degree from Princeton University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina.
She has written several novels including Circle of Three, which won the 2015 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Novel Award, and Unfurling Lily (PNWA award-winning). She has also won awards for her short stories “Ordinary Commerce,” “Of Crab Traps and Fisherwomen,” and “Stalled Symphony,” which won the 2011 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and is the inspiration for both a television series and a new musical set in a fancy mall bathroom. Her stories have also appeared in the G.W. Review, Short Story, and Narrative Magazine. She is actively at work developing several television series and films including one based on her time as an Amazon wife learning to love Seattle and most NORMAL, a coming of age story heavily based on Ms. Wilke’s experiences in Charlotte in the 80s, from the way busing did (and failed to) change the social landscape, to the challenges of living with parents experimenting with open marriage (and a little too much weed). A short story entitled “Hidden Dangers of Camping” appears in Narrative Magazine and depicts one of the scenes in the pilot for NORMAL. Her written and produced short film LINES won several awards and she has produced several other films in 2023 and 2024, including THE REBEL GIRLS (award-winning film about survivors of a civil rights era atrocity) and ONE FOR THE TEAM (pilot about a trans male lacrosse player in Los Angeles) .
Ms. Wilke is a mother of two daughters and lives in Seattle and Southern California. She is an accomplished oil painter, a very messy cook, and a passionate philanthropist advocating for women, Indian higher education, the arts (with a special focus on theater and how it can grow in the digital age), and scientific progress (with a focus on computational biology). She is a Lyme Disease survivor, having spent a number of years on multiple antibiotics and as a result takes vitamins and sunshine seriously and tries to lighten up on most everything else. More than anything, she loves to create things – art, worlds and characters that explore the surprising joy found in connecting to other human beings – of knowing that a character or a world woven from daydreams and all the breaks and mended bits of her own life can deeply resonate with another person.