Wendy Paris

Wendy Paris is an essayist, journalist, story-teller and newly minted social worker who is the author of Splitopia: Dispatches from Today’s Good Divorce and How to Part Well (Simon & Schuster). She is a volunteer mentor-editor for The Op-Ed Project and the co-founder of the West Coast branch of a New York City-based author group that has been running for more than 20 years.

Wendy also works as a collaborative writer, teaming up with nonprofits, pro-social business founders, psychologists and thought leaders to help them share their message through nonfiction books. Her last three book projects have been collaborations, including Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The 6 Mindshifts You Need to Rise and Thrive at Work (Wylie, 2022) with Aliza Knox,  Big Kibble: The Hidden Dangers of the Commercial Pet Food Industry and How to Do Better By Our Dogs, (Macmillan, November 2020) with Shawn Buckley and Oscar Chavez, and Buy the Change You Want to See: Use Your Purchasing Power to Make the World a Better Place (Penguin Random House, 2019), with Jane Mosbacher Morris. 

Before writing about divorce, Wendy spent many years writing about romance and weddings. She co-authored the perennial backlist seller Words for the Wedding: 1000 Quotes on Love and Marriage (Perigee/Penguin-Putnam, 2011, 2000), with Andrew Chesler, ghostwrote part of The Knot’s Complete Guide to Weddings in the Real World, and authored Happily Ever After: The Fairy Tale Formula for Lasting Love (HarperCollins, 2001), a humorous reinterpretation of ten classic fairy tales that was translated into 14 languages. 

As a freelance journalist, Wendy has contributed to The New York Times, Psychology Today, The New York Observer, Jewish Journal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz,  ArtNEWS, Wine Spectator, Salon.com and Marketplace Radio, as well as women's magazines including Self, Glamour, Family Circle, Fitness, Brides, and theknot.com. She has written three essays for The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, including “In the Grips of Nature’s Own Form of Birth Control,” which was one of the most shared pieces Thanksgiving weekend.

She also worked as a Senior Editor at Psychology Today magazine, an art columnist for the Houston Press, and a television producer for WNBC-TV in New York City. 

In 2021- 2022, Wendy held a macro-practice social work field placement at JFS Care, a division of Jewish Family Service LA, focusing on providing caregivers for aging Los Angeles residents. While there, she created a training program for newly hired caregivers, instituted communications practices, and helped launch a new service providing emotional and logistical support for family caregivers.

She has held fellowships with the think-tank New America foundation and with Encore.org, and been a visiting artist at the MacDowell Colony and the 18th Street Arts Center. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction Writing from Columbia University, an MSW with a focus on aging from The Ohio State University and a BA in English from the Honor’s College at the University of Houston. 

She has lived in Ohio, Michigan, Houston, Beaumont, Paris, Manhattan, Hoboken and in the wilds of New York State, high atop a mountain, surrounded by 30,000 acres of state forest. She currently lives six blocks from the ocean in Santa Monica, CA, along with her son, Alexander, and their dog, Marshmallow.