Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill (born November 14, 1968) is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.

Early life Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers. where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: waitress, bartender, caterer, cashier, medical transcriber, fact-checker, and ghost-writer.

Career Writing Offill's first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Bloomsbury. It was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Offill's second novel, Dept. of Speculation, was published in January 2014 and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Dept. of Speculation has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Fiction Award. In 2016 Offill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her work has appeared in the Paris Review. She is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and the author of several children's books. Offill's short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature and Significant Objects. Her third novel, Weather, was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, and in December 2020, Emily Temple of Literary Hub reported that the novel had made 13 lists of the best books of 2020.

Teaching Offill has taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University and Queens University of Charlotte. She served as Visiting Writer at Syracuse University and Sarah Lawrence College, and as Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College and Pratt University. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Personal life As of 2008, Offill worked as a creative writing teacher at Brooklyn College and Columbia University. She has a child, Theo, with her partner, David Hirme. Offill lives in the Hudson Valley.

Works

Novels Last Things. Bloomsbury, 2000.

Children's books

While You Were Napping, Random House Children's Books, 2014.

As co-editor