Jessica Hollander’s story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize  judged by Katherine Dunn. The collection, published by the University of North Texas Press, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, calling it “a potent work from a strong new literary voice.”

 

Jessica Hollander grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan surrounded by decorative paper and book art. As a kid, she spent time on the road, traveling to art fairs with her parents and brother, where she stuffed paper-covered boxes, frames, and journals in bags and played games quietly (and sometimes loudly) beneath linen-draped tables. When her parents opened Hollander’s, a decorative paper and art supply store in the historic Kerrytown Shops, she quit traveling for a while.

 

She stayed in Ann Arbor for her undergraduate education and attended the University of Michigan, where she received a B.A. in English and Literature. By the time she graduated she realized she’d lived in Ann Arbor from birth to twenty-two, and she figured it was time to see something new. She lived in Chapel Hill for a few years, where she worked as a teller at Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) and accumulated a number of stories. She then moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to attend the University of Alabama’s Creative Writing Program.

 

Jessica completed her MFA at the University of Alabama in 2011 and received the Outstanding Thesis Award in Creative Writing. During her time there, she also received Alumni Fiction Awards for her stories Staring Contests, March On, This Kind of Happiness (as Not a Family), and Blooms Lined Up Like This, judged by Michael Mejia, Noy Holland (for the middle two), and Beth Lordan, respectively. Her stories have appeared in over fifty journals, including The Journal, Quarterly West, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Web Conjunctions, as well as in the anthology The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers published by Black Lawrence Press. She is currently an Instructor of English at The University of Alabama, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition, including an upper-level class on Gothic writing.

 

Jessica lives with her husband, Richard, and son, Oliver, in Northport, Alabama.