Jess Row | |
Birth Date: | October 25, 1974 |
Birth Place: | Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Education: | B.A., Yale University (1997) M.F.A., University of Michigan (2001) |
Genre: | American literature |
Jess Row (born 1974 in Washington, D.C.) is an American short story writer, novelist, and professor.
He received a B.A. in English from Yale University[1] in 1997. He later taught English in Hong Kong for two years. He completed his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan[1] in 2001.
His debut novel Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2014) explored racial reassignment surgery against the backdrop of post-industrial Baltimore.[2]
His stories have appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker,[3] Harvard Review, Ploughshares,[4] Granta,[5] Witness, The Atlantic, Kyoto Journal and the Best American Short Stories of 2001 and 2003.[6]
He was an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey and as of 2021 teaches at New York University as a professor of English and used to teach in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.[6] He is also a teacher and student of Zen Buddhism.
He has received many awards for his fiction, among them a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, he received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete his book White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination. Most notably, Professor Row won the Guggenheim Fellowship.[7]
He currently resides in New York City with his wife Sonya Posmentier and his two children.