A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds a BA in English from West Virginia University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Oxford American, River Teeth, Image, Bellingham Review, Willow Springs, Gulf Coast, New England Review, AGNI, Fourth Genre, and other publications. Her prose has been selected for inclusion in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (Vandalia Press); Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean (Ohio University Press); Red Holler (Sarabande); Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, Seventh Edition (Longman); Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade Books); and Best American Spiritual Writing (Houghton Mifflin). She was selected as the 2007-2008 Milton Fellow with Image and Seattle Pacific University for work on her first novel, Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012), winner of ForeWord Reviews’  2012 Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize. Her second novel, My Radio Radio, is published by Vandalia Press (2016); her collection of portrait essays, The Long Weeping, published by Orison Books (2017), won the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the essay category; and her novel Call It Horses (2021) won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Her second collection of essays, Yoke & Feather, released with Dzanc in November 2024. Other recognition includes the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundación Valparaíso, Wildacres, and Ucross.

Jessie has taught for over twenty years in college classrooms and adult literacy programs, and she directed the low-residency MFA writing program of West Virginia Wesleyan College for seven years. She lives in Roanoke, Virginia and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University.

Follow Jessie on Instagram: @monathehound

To see what Jessie has been reading, visit her Goodreads page.

(Photo by David Flores)