Jess Row (born 1974 in Washington, D.C.) is an American short story writer, novelist, and professor.

Early life

He received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1997. He later taught English in Hong Kong for two years. He completed his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan in 2001.

Career

His debut novel Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2014) explored racial reassignment surgery against the backdrop of post-industrial Baltimore. His stories have appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Witness, The Atlantic, Kyoto Journal and the Best American Short Stories of 2001 and 2003. He was an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey and as of 2021 teaches at New York University as a professor of English and used to teach in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is also a teacher and student of Zen Buddhism.

Awards

He has received many awards for his fiction, among them a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, he received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete his book White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination. Most notably, Professor Row won the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Personal life

He currently resides in New York City with his wife Sonya Posmentier and his two children.

Works

Books

Short stories

Articles and essays