I first began crafting stories in elementary school. Not as a writer, but as a horse. Afternoons when school was out, I paced circles in our front yard, telling myself stories. These were apparently complicated and emotional, because my grandmother later told me that watching me from the window, she’d assumed all my head-tossing and galloping meant I was playing at being a horse.
Graduating from horse to scribe, I wrote short narratives (although I wouldn’t have known the word then) during dull high school summers, capturing my friends’ romances, family lives, and quotidian dramas. Who broke up with whom, who was marooned at summer camp, and who got caught pocketing mascara at the drugstore were pivotal plot points.
In college, I read Joan Didion’s observation that, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live… [We] live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” In those words I recognized why I write.
I am compelled by a single theme in my fiction and nonfiction: women and girls bearing more responsibility than they believe they can carry, and the ways they — we — learn to thrive.
My memoir, Invisible Sisters, tells my story of my coming of age as the surviving “well sibling” of three sisters. My second book, Braving The Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss, is a craft guide that considers ways to write well about heartbreak. My novel The Magnetic Girl, which tells my imagined story of the true-life vaudeville sensation Lulu Hurst, was honored with the 2020 Southern Book Prize.
I earned my MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and my B.S. from Emerson College in Boston. In a former career universe I worked behind the scenes on television shows that you probably watched in the ‘80s and ‘90s. More recently I’ve served as the Ferrol Sams, Jr. Distinguished Writer in Residence at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, been honored with the Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and enjoyed writing residencies at The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia, the Newnan, Georgia “ArtsRez,” and elsewhere. I’m currently a visiting faculty member at West Virginia Wesleyan College’s low-residency MFA, a member of the faculty at the Etowah Valley MFA at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, and a mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer program. I live in Atlanta with my husband, novelist Mickey Dubrow, sometimes multiple cats, and a drum kit and guitar that I don’t play enough.
Regal House Publishing is delighted to bring you Jessica’s novel The World to See in 2026.
