JR Fenn

JR Fenn grew up on a remote mountaintop in the Central Appalachians. Her work has been shaped by time living on the edge of coastal Alaska, among English palm trees, in the towns and cities of southern Thailand and Burma, as well as in Western Upstate New York, where she was born and now lives.

The recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction, she earned her MFA from Syracuse University (2022), where she studied with George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, Mona Awad, and Jonathan Dee. She has had two stories published in special issues of Boston Review and her work has appeared widely in journals including DIAGRAM, Versal, PANK, and Stone Canoe, selected by editors and judges including Roxanne Gay, Junot Díaz, and Darin Strauss. A previous winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, she has also published nonfiction online in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere.

JR teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her dissertation focused on medieval literature and she spent a spell working in the Rare Book Library. She also has an MAT from Hollins University and has taught in K-12 settings.

Her work has been selected for funded residencies at Hewnoaks, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, and more, as well as being supported by competitive fellowships from Orion, Writing by Writers, Disquiet, and Key West Literary Seminar. She is a Tin House alum.

Representation: Catherine Cho at Paper Literary.