Hi! I’m Jessica, and I’m the founder of Literary Boston, a cultural initiative that promotes the local literary community, past and present. Other literary roles include literary history tour guide, library assistant, bookseller at both indies and Barnes & Noble, book festival director and social media manager, lit mag founder, lit org board member — and, of course, writer.

I hold a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and an MA in Literature from Harvard University (Extension), where my thesis on Moby-Dick and Calvinism won the Director’s Prize (yes, I wrote that for fun!). During my time in my master’s program, I tried to take as many classes in American Literature as I could, specifically 19th c. New England literature. And yes, there was a bit of literary theory in there, too.

My writing has appeared the North American Review, the Emerson Review, Writer’s Bone, and others, and my short story “Rose” received the Leah Lovenheim Award for Short Fiction. I’m also a freelance ghostwriter with over a hundred pieces published out there on the web. You can find my portfolio here.

I recently graduated from GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program, a year-long novel writing craft intensive, where I worked on a novel about paramedics in 1970s Boston (still in progress!).

Finally, my passion for “digging into the text” lead me to run a book club for a few years we called “English class over dinner,” as well as a nine-month informal “Moby-Dick Class” where I guided friends through the novel.