Jessie Hennen

Short version:

Jessie Hennen is a writer who lives on a farm!

Longer version:

She grew up in Shoreview, Minnesota and attended college at the University of Minnesota Morris, a public liberal arts college where, she rode horses, performed with the improv troupe The Unusual Suspects, and starred in embarrassing sketch comedy videos. She graduated with a dual BA in English and German.

In December 2010 she moved to Munich, Germany, because it seemed like the next thing to do. In Munich, she worked first as an English-speaking nanny for a high-profile family, then as a translator, editor and project manager at the word-of-mouth marketing firm trnd. She was one of the founding members of the city’s first English-speaking improv troupe, Bake This.

In July 2012 she moved back to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with teachers like Charles D’Ambrosio, Ethan Canin, Kate Christensen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Karen Russell. She has published essays in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and on The Millions; she’s been an artist-in-residence at the Des Moines-based RDG Design. In 2015, she traveled to Wellington, NZ to teach a summer fiction workshop at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. For a heady year, she organized the events program at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, running readings for writers like David Sedaris and Leslie Jamison. She’s taught community education classes to St. Paul’s elementary schoolers, English to eighth-graders at the Blake School, and novel drafting to adult writers at the Loft Literary Center.

She is an assistant professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, MN. With her husband Miles Taylor and comedian Madi RT, she runs a sketch comedy show (“A Granite Falls Home Companion“) that performs live and recorded sketches at venues in rural Minnesota. She is also the communications director for the Granite Falls Community Artist in Residence program.

Her debut novel Fundamentally Unstable — literary fiction about the aftermath of an abusive relationship — and other fiction work is represented by P.S. Literary’s Cecilia Lyra.

Twitter at @JessieHennen1.