Rita Bullwinkel Books in Order

Rita Bullwinkel grew up in Portola Valley, California, a small Bay Area town, and for a long time sports mattered more to her than fiction. As a teenager she chased stronger teams, changed schools for water polo, and later played Division I water polo at Brown. That athletic background still shows up in her work, especially in the way she writes about bodies, pressure, repetition, pain, and the odd mix of discipline and obsession that competition can create.

Writing came later.

Bullwinkel has said that before college she had never found fiction she loved, so she assumed she simply was not a fiction reader. Then she took an introductory writing class with Joanna Howard. The books on that syllabus changed things. She has described spending the next summer reading her way through the list and then outward from it, and that turn, from athlete and maker into obsessive reader, became the start of her life as a writer.

She was always making things, though. Before books took over, she sewed her own clothes, painted, and built furniture out of broken surfboards and whatever else she could salvage. She has also talked about working retail jobs before publishing her fiction. That mix of handwork, odd labor, and close observation feels important to her writing. Her stories often notice the texture of objects, the awkwardness of work, and the ways people carry themselves through rooms.

Her first book, Belly Up, arrived in 2018 and immediately showed what kind of writer she was going to be. These stories include ghosts, mediums, obsessed lovers, teenage girls who think they are plants, and people whose bodies feel strange to them, or newly fragile, or suddenly impossible to ignore. The collection won the 2018 Believer Book Award, and Bullwinkel received a Whiting Award in 2022. Readers who connect with Belly Up usually like its mix of deadpan humor, emotional precision, and clean, unsentimental strangeness.

She does not seem interested in neat categories.

That helps explain why Headshot, her first novel, feels both like a sports book and like something harder to pin down. Set over two hot days at a girls' boxing tournament in Reno, it follows eight young fighters as they try to win the Daughters of America Cup. Bullwinkel turns that setup into a book about ambition, memory, envy, performance, and the private storms inside public competition. Because she knows serious athletics from the inside, the novel never treats the ring like a metaphor first and a sport second. The sweat, repetition, and focus all matter.

Across both Belly Up and Headshot, some patterns keep returning. Bullwinkel writes about bodies under pressure. She writes about girls and women learning what power feels like. She writes about the space between ordinary life and something slightly unreal, then lets both states exist at once. Even when her premises are unusual, the emotions underneath them are plain and recognizable: shame, hunger, tenderness, loneliness, desire, and the wish to be very good at something.

That plainness matters too. In interviews, Bullwinkel has said she distrusts sentimentality and wants fiction to feel compelling and honest. You can feel that in her sentences. They are precise, sometimes funny, sometimes cold, and usually more interested in truth than comfort. She can be bizarre on the surface and deeply humane underneath, which is a hard balance to pull off.

Now she lives in San Francisco, teaches at the University of San Francisco, and edits McSweeney's Quarterly. She has also worked as an editor with The Believer and NOON. So her career now sits in a few different places at once: writing, teaching, and helping shape other people's work. It suits someone who came to fiction a little later than some writers do, then dove in all the way.