About Marilee

Marilee was raised in a dying Midwest town hit hard by a changing 90s economy. Now she’s compelled to write about forgotten places and invisible outsiders searching for where they belong. Most of all, she’s inspired by the women in her family: no-nonsense farmers and nurses who drive pickups, eat at McDonald’s and don’t get knocked over by a 40-mile hour wind or anything else that life hurls at them.

Marilee has a B.A. in English and political science from the University of Minnesota. She currently lives in Washington, DC. Over the last ten years she’s studied creative writing through classes at The Writer’s Center and Gotham Writers.    

Her short stories have been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Bitter Oleander, The Colored Lens, Cleaver, Molotov Cocktail, Mystery Weekly, Orca Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She was the honorable mention in a Room Magazine Short Forms contest and won an Apparition Lit monthly flash fiction contest.

A good sample of Marilee’s prose is The Art of Making Angels, a short horror story inspired by the first women to become dentists in the late 1800s. This Chicago dentist, maybe not the most moral of dentists, won’t let a little competition put her out of business.

For something more sci-fi, check out Las Vegas Museum of Space Exploration. In this story, off-planet loot doesn’t stay contained. It oozes a path of destruction that will haunt everyone.

Marilee also writes feature film screenplays. Like her other writing, her screenplays are quirky, a bit dark but with plenty of heart, and feature flawed outsiders searching for their place in a mysterious world. In Wondrous Star, a bagpipe-loving bureaucrat falls in love with a long-lost 1950s scientist trapped in an alternate dimension and they risk a daring escape into an unknown future together. In Marilee’s most recent project, Skull Lace, a struggling artist uses her old sewing skills to survive an evil spirit that turns human bone into intricate lace.