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 (age 48) 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[1] 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[2] in 2001.^{[citation needed]}

Career

His debut novel Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2014) explored racial reassignment surgery against the backdrop of post-industrial Baltimore.[3]

His stories have appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker,[4] Harvard Review, Ploughshares,[5] Granta,[6] Witness, The Atlantic, Kyoto Journal and the Best American Short Stories of 2001 and 2003.[7]

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.[7] 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.[8]

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. Harvard University. 38. 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)

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jess Row.

• 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