Marlene Reed Wetzel was born April 5, 1937, and reared on a small, isolated ranch north of Mile City, Montana, but has also lived and worked in the Middle East. She graduated from the University of Tulsa with a bachelor's degree in English and is currently a freelance writer in Oklahoma.

Wetzel's "A Map of Tripoli, 1967" won the 2000 PEN/Amazon.com Short Story Award, an effort by the national association of literary writers and the online bookseller to discover unpublished writers. Wetzel's story was chosen the winner from among more than twelve thousand entries. Though the events of the story are based on her experiences living in Libya in the 1960s, Wetzel did not begin writing the piece until the late 1990s. Referring to the origins of the story in an interview on the Amazon.com web site, Wetzel noted, "The politics and grudges of the Middle East...