Jenny Offill
Visiting Writer in Residence
Academic Program Affiliation(s): Written Arts
Biography:
Jenny Offill is an acclaimed fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo. Offill previously taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina; and served as Visiting Writer at Syracuse University and Sarah Lawrence College, and as Writer in Residence at Vassar College and Pratt University.BA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Stegner Fellow in Fiction, Stanford University. (2020– ).