Weeklong Guest: Wende Dikec
On Online Mindful Writers Group Page I invite a new guest-of honor every week. This week’s guest is the best-selling and award-winning novelist, Wende Smilek Dikec. She also writes as Abigail Drake. To read her daily posts click the button “Visit and Join” at the middle of the Home Page. Here is her bio:
Abigail Drake has spent her life traveling the world, collecting stories wherever she visited. She majored in Japanese and Economics in college and worked in import/export and as an ESL teacher before she committed herself full time to writing.
She is the award-winning author of thirteen novels, two novellas, and two short stories. Her non-fiction article about the life of a child in Istanbul was published in Faces Magazine (an imprint of Cricket Magazine) in February 2016. She also blogs about her dog, a Labrador named Capone.
Abigail is a member of Pennwriters, RWA, Three Rivers Romance Writers, Mindful Writers, Women’s Fiction Writers, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She was a featured author for Beaver County BookFest in 2017, the Keynote Speaker at Pennwriters Annual Conference in 2017, and a workshop presenter at the Maryland Writers Association Annual Conference. She also teaches writing to children at schools and through local libraries.
Her books have been awarded many honors, including the 2020 Stiletto Prize, the 2017 Prism Award, and the 2017 International Digital Award. She was awarded an honorable mention for her book “Love, Chocolate, and a Dog Named Al Capone” in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-book Awards in 2019. In addition, she was named a finalist in the Golden Pen, the Golden Leaf, the Dante Rossetti Book Award, and the Cygnus Award for Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction. She was also a third-place finalist three years in a row for the Pennwriters Novel Beginnings Contest, which feels like a sort of accomplishment.
Abigail lives in Beaver, Pennsylvania with her husband, Demir. They have three grown sons, family and friends all over the world, and a constantly growing bucket list for post-pandemic travel. She is represented by Lauren Bieker of FinePrint Literary Management.