Welcome to the Jennyverse.
The release of every new chapter in the serialization of What the Dead Can Say will be accompanied by a brief audio excerpt, each one read by a different author. And so, as the weeks pass, the Jennyverse Chorus of voices will continue to grow.
Mary Cappello, a queer nonfictionist, former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, is the author of seven books.
Kate McCahill is the author of Patagonian Road: A Year Alone through Latin America. She teaches writing and chairs the English department at the Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico.
Alizah Holstein is the author of My Roman History (Viking Press). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts’ “International MFA” program, and a PhD in medieval Italian history from Cornell University.
Samuel Harps is an award-winning playwright, with recent productions on Captain Paul Cuffe, and playwright William Henry Brown, who created the first known all-black theater company established in New York in 1821. Samuel is the artistic director of Shades Repertory Theater.
Katherine Scott Nelson (Scott, they/them) writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Scott’s novella, Have You Seen Me, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. They have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and their work has been featured in Brevity, Confrontation and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Chicago area, Scott lives in Los Angeles.
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the Massachusetts Book Award winning Noon until Night, and the recent People Once Real. He is Emeritus Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
Janice N. Harrington is the author of four collections of poetry, including the award-winning Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, the newly released Yard Show (BOA Editions), and eight celebrated children’s books. A Cave Canem and Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.
Michele Morano is the author of the essay collections Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, and Like Love. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, WaveForm: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and many others. She teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago.
Elizabeth Kostova is the author of three novels—The Historian, The Swan Thieves, and The Shadow Land. She is founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, which offers opportunities for writers in Bulgarian and in English. Kostova lives with her family in North Carolina.
William Gillespie has published 14.75 books under six different names, most notably Keyhole Factory by William Gillespie.
Leanne Ogasawara lived in Japan for two decades, where she worked as a translator. Her creative writing has appeared in Aeon, The Millions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Kyoto Journal, and elsewhere. Her short story “Bare Bones” received the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates.
Katherine Vaz's latest novel, Above the Salt (Flatiron/Macmillan, 2023) was a People Magazine Book of the Week. Her other books include Saudade, Mariana, Fado & Other Stories, and Our Lady of the Artichokes. A former Briggs-Copeland Fellow at Harvard, she is the first Portuguese American with her work recorded for the Archives of the Library of Congress.
Ivy Grimes lives in Georgia, and her stories have been published in The Baffler, Maudlin House, hex, ergot., and elsewhere. Her collection Glass Stories is out with Grimscribe Press, and she is the author of the novel Star Shapes.
David Jauss is the author of Glossolalia: New and Selected Stories, and Nice People, New and Selected Stories II, and he is the author of two collections of craft essays on the art of fiction, Words Made Flesh, and Alone With All That Could Happen. He has also published two collections of poetry, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers.
Ladette Randolph is the author of four books of fiction and one book of nonfiction. She is currently the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Ploughshares and on the faculty at Emerson College in Boston. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation grant, the Nebraska Book Award, a Virginia Faulkner Award, and many others.
Miriam Sagan's most recent books are a post apocalyptic novella, Commune of the Golden Sun (Cholla Needles, 2024) and a poetry collection confronting mortality Thanks for Stopping By (Blue Edge, 2024).
Christine Sneed's most recent books are Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos and Direct Sunlight: Stories. She teaches creative writing for Northwestern University and Stanford Continuing Studies and lives in Pasadena, California.