Jess Row

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

Jess Row
Row in 2019
Born	(1974-10-25) October 25, 1974 Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation	Writer professor literary critic
Education	B.A., Yale University (1997) M.F.A., University of Michigan (2001)
Genre	American literature

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

• The Train to Lo Wu. The Dial Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-38533-789-2.
  • "Heaven Lake," Reprinted from Harvard Review 22, Spring 2002
• Nobody Ever Gets Lost. FiveChapters Books. 2011. ISBN 978-0-98293-922-2.
• Your Face In Mine. Riverhead Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1-59448-834-4.
• White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. Graywolf Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1555978327.

Short stories

• "The Answer". Granta (97: Best of Young American Novelists 2). Spring 2007.
• "Amritsar". The Atlantic. Fiction Issue. 2008.
• "The Call of Blood". Harvard Review. 38. Harvard University. Spring 2010.
• "The World in Flames". FiveChapters. 2011. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 26 August 2015.

Articles and essays

• "Portrait of My Father". Granta. 2009. Retrieved 29 September 2015.
• "A Confession". Granta (128: American Wild). Autumn 2013. (Subscription Required)

External links

• Author's Official Website
• Kyoto Journal magazine
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• Review of The Train to Lo Wu at WaterBridge Review
• Review of Your Face in Mine at The New York Times