Inara Verzemnieks is a writer whose work focuses on people making homes in places where no one was meant to live, and whose preferred method is to inhabit the worlds she writes about. For 13 years Verzemnieks was a staff writer at the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, where she wrote features often focused on the city's overlooked people and places.  In 2007, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.  Verzemnieks left the paper in 2009 to focus on her writing career.  She is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, from which she will graduate with an MFA in May 2013.  She received a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award earlier in 2012.