Jenny hollowell biography

Love, Secrets, and Second Chances—February’s Must-Read Books Await!

Jenny Hollowell's short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Scheherezade, and the anthology New Sudden Fiction, and was named a distinguished story by Best American Short Stories. She received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction and recipient of the Balch Short Story Award. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. This is her first novel.

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Series

Books:

I took a single fiction workshop as an undergraduate, with the writer Sheri Reynolds. She was the first person I ever met who had published a book; her first novel, The Rapture of Canaan, came out during the semester I was taking her class. Until that point, the names on the books I read seemed exotic and inaccessible. Writers, I imagined, lived in London or Paris or New York City. They were all sixty-five. They looked like the black and white photographs on book jackets, even in real life.

But here was my teacher: an actual novelist, who wasn't much more than twenty-five years old, and who was, like me, from the American South. Christ Almighty, she wore jeans and carried a backpack. She was practically like me.

I wanted to impress her, this writer I knew, and agonized over the stories I wrote that semester. They were forgettable family melodramas—aphids and kudzu and family secrets, that's what my stories were made of—but I actually sat down and wrote them, a significant step for someone whose literary output to date was a folder full of s

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