JR Fenn is from the Central Appalachians. She’s made her home in coastal Alaska, the dry seas of the Big Bend in Texas, the cityscapes of London, Bangkok, Yangon, and Manhattan, and the southwestern peninsula of the United Kingdom. She writes about the web of relationships between humans, plants, animals, and places as they change over time.

She is the author of Tiny Vessels, chosen by Rita Bullwinkel for the Masters Review Chapbook Open, forthcoming from Red Mare Press in February 2026. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in many places, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip, 100 Word Story, The Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology, and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, among others.

JR holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction, as well as a PhD from Columbia University, where she worked in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her husband, their two children, and of course the family’s two border collies and four guinea pigs.