Ella Jacobson
Photo by Elizabeth Weissberg
Bio
Ella Jacobson is a writer and cultural critic from Alaska. Her work has appeared in the Drift, the Guardian,the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life,and High Country News, among other publications. She holds a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and is the 2022 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer in Nonfiction. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence Program, Monson Arts, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and others. She is currently at work on her first book.
The morning I received news of this grant, I was preparing to moderate a panel at the Miami Book Fair, writing out questions to ask three memoirists who had just released their first books. The next day, sitting on the panel, I felt a profound sense of luck. I was surrounded by people who’d dedicated themselves to the work I found most meaningful, and I’d just been given the resources to join them. The gift of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts gives me time and space to experiment and explore. I will be using this period to work on my first book, a piece of creative nonfiction that explores how people metabolize their exposure to unintentional violence.