Jessie Hennen is a Minnesota-born writer, performer, teacher, and artist. Born in the suburbs of St. Paul, she now lives on a farm near Marshall, where she directs the Creative Writing and Literature programs at Southwest Minnesota State University. As Jessie Hennen is fond of telling her students, her undergraduate degrees really could have been in anything; after receiving a full-ride National Merit Scholarship to the University of Minnesota, Morris, she majored first in theater, then in art, then in “undecided.” In the end, she wound up with dual BAs in English Language / Literature and German, largely because she had kept taking classes in both areas throughout and had to graduate with something. ​After graduation, she lived for two years in Munich, Germany, where she worked first as a nanny and then in marketing. During that time, she was a founding member of the English-language improv troupe Bake This!. She also applied the fanfiction-writing skills she learned in high school to working on short stories – and was then accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned a fiction MFA and completed multiple residencies at the Des Moines architecture firm RDG Design. A recipient of the 2015 International Institute of Modern Letters postgraduate fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington, she traveled to New Zealand to teach… then returned to Minneapolis to work on her first novel (now shelved) and sling coffee as a barista / meet hundreds of people each week as a substitute teacher in the St. Paul public schools. She’s been an educator at the Loft Literary Center, an ACT/SAT tutor, a college essay coach, and a professional events bookseller. Now, she is a contented English professor, sketch comedy showrunner, and novelist. She and her husband Miles Taylor live on a farm with four cats, seven chickens (one half-feral, the rest tame), and a needy dog named Campion. Head here for info on agency representation; here for her teaching resume; here for info on other projects, including her career as a child illustrator and creator of a tiny village.