Biography
Originally from Albany, New York, Jessica has lived in the Boston area since moving there for graduate school at Boston University. A former news and feature reporter for United Press International, she taught creative writing at Tufts University and Harvard Extension School before joining the faculty at Emerson College, where she is a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing.
Her story collection Please Come Back To Me received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her other books are the novels The Gretchen Question, How Will I Know You?, Lacy Eye, and And Give You Peace, and the story collections Absent Without Leave, Infinite Dimensions, and the forthcoming I Felt My Life with Both My Hands. Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points, and other journals, and has appeared in The Best American Short Stories.
In addition to fiction, Jessica has published essays and book reviews for publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Glamour, and The Huffington Post. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and held a fiction fellowship at The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. A former member of the Board of Directors of PEN-New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, she lives in Lexington, Mass. with her husband, Philip Holland. If you can't find her at her desk, the next place to look is a tennis court.