Photo credit: Steven Underhill

Rose Whitmore is the author of Exiled, a historical epic that follows a weightlifting prodigy across four decades of Enver Hoxha's brutal dictatorship over Cold War-era Albania. The book explores freedom and resistance through the intimate focus of sport, language, and imagination.

Rose was a 2017-2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction, a Jones Lecturer, and the recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for excellence in teaching at Stanford University. She received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire.

Rose is the recipient of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review and the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review. She has received fellowships from Hemingway’s House in Ketchum, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Hedgebrook, and the San Leandro Arts Commission. She is a 2026 Get the Word Out Fiction Fellow through Poets & Writers.

She currently teaches in the Memoir Certificate Program through Stanford Continuing Studies and lives in San Leandro, California with her beloved flock of chickens. In a former life, she was an All-American rugby player for Cal and played for the United States National Team.