About the author

Jennifer Wilson has been a rock writer, investigative reporter, high school English teacher, Big Band radio DJ, storyteller for The Moth, and both a local newspaper and national magazine editor. Her work has appeared in Esquire, National Geographic Traveler, Gourmet, NPR’s All Things Considered, Better Homes & Gardens, No Depression, Travel with Rick Steves (her episode won a Lowell Thomas Gold award), and many other places. 

Her first book, Running Away to Home, received Best Nonfiction Book of 2012 from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (a peer award) and the 2012 Iowa Emerging Author Award. 

In 2016, midwest iconoclast Raygun released a limited publication of Jennifer Wilson's environmental novel Water. In 2023, Water was chosen for the CCI first-ever book club pick.

In 2015, Wilson contributed to the National Geographic book Journeys Home, edited by Andrew McCarthy.

Jennifer Wilson earned an MFA in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2019, where she served as her cohort's literary journal editor in chief. In 2020, her short story "Them Boys"  won Honorable Mention in the final issue of Glimmer Train. 

Wilson is  the Peggy Fisher and Larry Stelter Chair of Magazine and Brand Media in the Drake University School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and head of the  E.T. Meredith Center for Magazine, Brand Media and Multimedia Education, teaching journalism classes and advising student publications at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.