The daughter of Yugoslav immigrants, Tanja Pajevic was born in Chicago, IL, and received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After receiving her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University, she spent the 2001-2002 academic year in Slovenia on a Fulbright Fellowship, researching and writing a novel.

When she returned to the U.S., she moved to Colorado, where she taught adjunct classes in Creative Writing, Business Writing and literature at the University of Colorado at Denver and the Community College of Denver before accepting an instructor position at the University of Colorado at Denver.

In the fall of 2005, Tanja left to pursue her own writing and work as an independent Writing Instructor and Consultant. She continues to teach workshops and work with local businesses and individuals on a consultant basis.

She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Developmental Faculty Award from the University of Colorado at Denver for her project "Writing as Healing," and a Writer's Grant from the Vermont Studio Center. Other awards include a Kraft Fellowship, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), and the Hemingway Fellowship in Fiction from Indiana University.

Tanja often explores the immigrant experience, the intersection between cultures and the former Yugoslavia in her work. She is particularly interested in the ways we bridge culture and country, what we hand down from generation to generation, what we choose to keep, and what, ultimately, we must leave behind. Her work has most recently appeared in Crab Orchard Review and on www.mentalcontagion.com.

She currently writes the blog www.PeasantWoman.com and is working on House of Defiance, a memoir about her year traveling through post-war, former Yugoslavia.

Tanja lives in Boulder, CO, with her husband, son and their dog, Loki.