Jessamyn Hope is an award-winning writer of fiction and memoir. Her debut novel Safekeeping was a Boston Globe recommended read; acclaimed by The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, and Tablet Magazine; a New York Public Library Staff Pick; a National Jewish Book Club pick; winner of the J.I. Segal Award; and a finalist for both the Harold U. Ribalow Prize and the Paterson Fiction Prize. Safekeeping can also be found at number two on BuzzFeed's "53 Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down."
Her short memoirs—originally published in Ploughshares, Five Points, PRISM International, Colorado Review and The Common—have received two Pushcart Prize honorable mentions, been named a Best American Notable Essay, and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Essays, The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in The Hopkins Review, Descant, The Fiddlehead, J Journal, Green Mountains Review, and other literary magazines. She was the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
Hope was raised in Montreal by a mother who was born in Italy and a father who grew up in South Africa, where his grandparents were immigrants from Lithuanian. After living in Israel, she moved to New York City, which has been her home for the last twenty-six years, aside from a happy two-year stint in Boston and a current year-long sabbatical in Tel Aviv. She shares her home with her scholarly husband (hence, the sabbatical) and two maladjusted rescue dogs. Aside from her obsession with literature and film, Jessamyn is an avid traveler who has backpacked in sixty countries, from the Mongolian steppes to the Amazonian backwaters; ridden the trans-Siberian railway twice; and bicycled from Istanbul to Gibraltar.
The rest is in her memoirs.