Features

From insightful interviews to engaging essays, Jessica's work resonates with readers and critics alike.

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December 2023

The Muscle For Escape

This is one of those stories you bring out near last call so you’ll never have to go home.

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Short Reads

March 2023

Marshall Crenshaw's Someday Someway

Stop what you’re doing right now and cue this baby up. It will only take about three minutes of your time, the length of a standard radio pop hit. Because that’s what it is. A power-pop hit.

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March Fadness

May 2022

Notice

“Notice,” my yoga teacher coos. I open one eye to notice that on the Zoom screen, he’s sitting upright. Sukhasana. I settle myself in the same posture on my yoga mat in my living room, legs crossed, spine straight.

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Brevity Magazine

May 2022

Owning My Worth

When I was 8 years old, my father, who turned out to be terrible with money, worked on a colleague’s campaign for U.S. Senate. One day I walked into my parents’ bedroom to find my father sitting on the bed, surrounded by an ocean of cash.

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Oldster

January 2022

Permanent Record

Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100.

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Full Grown People

March 2021

Searching for Memory

My mother and I played a secret game in art museums. What, we would ask the other, is the single piece we would take for our own if such a thing were possible?

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After The Art

April 2019

7 Honest Books About Hoaxes

I’ve long wondered what makes a person believe something improbable — either really believe, or convince themselves to err on the side of a questionable opinion, even if on some level they suspect they’re being taken for a ride.

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Electric Literature

April 2019

Large Hearted Boy: Playlist for The Magnetic Girl

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

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Large Hearted Boy

January 2018

Siberia, Atlanta

When I tell you that my mother’s father was born in a Siberian prison, I’ll remind you that was because his parents were perhaps exiled as retribution for political acts. Or simply because they were Jews. He, however, was a baby.

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Brevity Mag

August 2017

On the Aftermath of a Home Made Bomb

When I was in my twenties, the house I shared with roommates in Arlington, Massachusetts was vandalized with a Molotov cocktail. This was the mid-1980s.

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The Manifestation

March 2017

Seance City, Florida

Most of my family is dead. I see them all the time, although it’s more accurate to say I feel them. Sometimes I think if I could turn my head quickly enough I’d catch them just behind my shoulders, but I never do.

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Bitter Southerner

August 2016

Night Time Is A Place

It’s August. The heat weighs down on the South into the wee hours, and bored suburban teenagers sneak quietly out their bedroom windows to find each other, to find community in a world that isn’t their parents’.

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Bitter Southerner

November 2015

You in the Beige

In some circles, Southern is still an unsettling quirk, an excuse for caricature—like the mute and heroic Boo Radley or wanton Daisy Mae Scragg, heartthrob of Dogpatch.

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Atlanta Magazine

January 2015

Write What You Don’t Know

As nonfiction writers, we’re proud of our fealty to the truth. We don’t make things up. Or, if we do make things up, we employ the deftness and elegance of signal phrases.

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Creative NonFiction

December 2013

Screenplay, “Outside the Wire”

In this short film made for the 48 Hour Film Festival, we explore the sense of reality and memory, in a nod to a famous scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

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SuperLux

Award Winning!

The Magnetic Girl

Set in a time of emerging electricity and heightened Spiritualism, "The Magnetic Girl" is an inspired novel about women's quest for political, cultural, and sexual presence.

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Events

Join Jessica Handler for writing workshops, book signings, and engaging conversations with award-winning authors!

Mar 9, 2025

Mar 14, 2025

Writing Family Stories

Join me for a week at Serenbe's Art Farm to learn techniques for writing about family: developing plot as well as for writing scene, description, and character. Together, we’ll explore innovative ways of bringing family dynamics to life on the page, including research, sensory engagement, and drawing (even if you’re not an artist.) We will read and discuss excerpts from well-known examples of family stories, and maybe share a little bit of our own writing, too.

Link Register here >