Jennifer Sears

Jennifer Sears is the author of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award judged by the novelist Margot Livesey. The book will be published by the University of Iowa Press in November 2025.

She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation of the Arts, and the 2024 NeMLA Fiction Book Award for a novel manuscript. Her stories and essays have been cited in Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She writes a newsletter about reading, writing, and teaching writing: Si Omnia Ficta…if all is fiction.

Jennifer graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York where she co-coordinates the Minor in Creative Writing with the poet Robert Ostrom. She lives in Brooklyn.