Jenny Pritchett's Biography

Jenny Pritchett's debut collection, At or Near the Surface, was published by Fourteen Hills Press in Fall 2008. The collection won the 2008 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award, judged by Tin House managing editor Holly MacArthur. Stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Northwest Review, Boulevard, Salt Hill, and Fiction Attic. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story "Bugaboo" was chosen by Steve Almond for the Best of the Web 2008 anthology from Dzanc Books. Her first novel, Believe Me When I Tell You, is represented by Zachary Schuster Harmsworth.

A former editor and journalist, Jenny has written for Bitch, Girlfriends, and Northwestern magazines, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and SFGate.com. She has been awarded fellowships and two residencies from the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois (January 2008, April 2009), and a fellowship from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in California.

Jenny holds a degree in magazine journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. The former managing editor of Fourteen Hills, she has taught creative writing and American literature at SFSU, California College of the Arts, Ex'pression Center for New Media, and The Writing Salon. She lives and writes in San Francisco.

"Jenny Pritchett’s 'Born and Raised', a story about a woman dealing with the reality and surreality of her miscarriage, delivers a masterful and unsentimental handling of a topic which, though hugely emotional and highly sensitive, can be overdone and become an unintentional self-parody. But Pritchett closes the story with a scene that is at once surprising, heart-wrenching, and satisfying." --Josh Maday, NewPages.com, in a review of Salt Hill 19

 "Jenny Pritchett’s wonderfully titled short short ('What I Was Doing the Night My Mother Died of a Brain Aneurysm And my Father Tried to Call Me at My Friend's House Where I said I’d Be') describes that fateful night with poetic concision. After sneaking out with her friend to a party, the narrator returns to find her friend’s mother and father waiting up for them. 'I thought they could smell it on me: beer, pot, sex,' the narrator relates, not knowing what has happened to her mother." --Dan Moreau, NewPages.com, in a review of Northwest Review, Volume 46, Number 2