Paula Friedman

Author and editor Paula Friedman lives and works in the Portland, Oregon, area.

* NEW! Just published in June 2026, author Paula Friedman's The Baby Book is the harrowing, heart-stirring account--between novel, memoir, and news reportage--of a loving yet isolated single mother and her wondrously buoyant baby amid the struggles and joys of late-20th-century America.

* Ursula K. Le Guin called Friedman's first novel, The Rescuer's Path, "exciting, physically vivid, and romantic." Cheryl Strayed said, "humane and wise, this book held me from the first page to the last."

* Wesley Hogan, author of Many Minds, One Heart, and director of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, has called Friedman's second book, The Change Chronicles: A Novel of the Sixties Antiwar Movement, "A triumph--illuminates the transformations experienced by brave people at the center of movements for change." Montreal Serai contributing editor Maya Khankhoje states: "The Change Chronicles is told with the raw intensity, vivid detail, and creditability of someone who was there."

* Since its 2022 publication, Friedman's Of Elegant Time: 22 Short Stories, has also received high praise. "Deeply personal tales, exquisite tales"--Jeremy Lichtman, author of Alien Puzzle Boxes. "These sharp stories pierce one's heart"--Helen Chuckrow, author of Interpreting the Bible with Chutzpah. "These are stories told with elegance . . . the best of images and language usage"--noted Hawaiian poet Frances Kukagawa. "Dancing close to autobiography, these well-written stories burn from the page"--Richard Bunning, author of Spider World and ther fictions.

Friedman's stories and poems have received two Pushcart nominations, and won honors and awards in the Winning Writers/North Point Books Prize competitions (Literary Fiction--2025), New Millennium Writing (2008, 2017, and others), Oregon State Poetry Association, Arch Street Press, Red/Green Press, and other literary competitions as well as residencies and fellowships from Flight of the Mind, Centrum, and other writing retreats and workshops.

For over 20 years, Friedman has edited books for publishers and individual authors and taught writing workshops in adult education programs in Berkeley, Paris, and Oregon. She is former director of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience, founding and facilitating editor of the Open Cell international literary review, and an editor (2013-2014) of the Science Fiction Microstories anthologies.

Forthcoming:

* Olde Earthe, Legends of Fore-Hahrar, and the Arc of the Corteixi: Tales of the End and Beginnings of Days, from Terra's 14th century C.E. to Year 2809 MOT (Mother-Orb Time) on Corteix III, Hahr, and Urrrr.

* Extremis! Oral Histories of the Garbage Era: Utopian and dystopian, this science fiction meta/parody novel features a brash, brave group of researchers and activists (Native American healer Samantha, the dedicated medical biologist Donati, gallant young Car and his pal the alien Nar, as well as the elegant bandit Black Bey--and Tee-Tee, a Bad Girl) as they struggle to save remnant human life on a post-nuclear, post-pandemics, and increasingly dessicated, baking Earth of the late 21st century and--perhaps--beyond, a struggle dependent on "found object" hints in writings left by . . . us, the humans of their recent past.

Still in progress, The Memoir Book will shed new light on what it was like to grow up during the World War II and Cold War years, to strive and struggle in the antiwar and counter-cultural '60s, and to trek the trembling arc from the late 20th century into old age--and thus expendability--here in our post-COVID-pandemic, overheating, AIs-driven, glitchy, Eve of Destruction world of today.

Look for Friedman's books on Amazon and other online stores and in whatever courageous bricks-and-mortar bookstores yet remain.