Jennifer Wortman
Photo by Amanda Tipton
Bio
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split Lip Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2018 Indiana Review Blue Light Books Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry appeared in TriQuarterly, Copper Nickel, Glimmer Train, Normal School, Electric Literature, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Hobart, North American Review, Juked, and elsewhere. An Ohio native, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she serves as an associate fiction editor for Colorado Review, teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and is at work on a novel-in-stories called Dreams of My Dead Husband.
Thomas Mann said a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Words fail me in response to this great honor. They fail me often. I am a slow writer, and it took me nearly half a century to get my short story collection out in the world. With the help of this National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, I hope to get my novel published, or at least written, before another half-century passes. Per my regularly scheduled self-doubt cycle, I had been questioning the viability of my novel, and of my work generally, when the NEA called. After hearing the astounding news, I cried. Then I laughed. Then I cried again. I might laugh and cry over this for the rest of my life.