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One of the Jenfolk

Jenny Shank grew up in Denver, Colorado, and earned degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado. Her short story collection Mixed Company won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and the Colorado Book Award in General Fiction in 2022. Her novel The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 2011) won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Book Awards, and a Tattered Cover Book Store Summer Reading 2011 selection.

Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Toast, Offline, Image, Printer's Row, Barrelhouse, Rocky Mountain News, Dallas Morning News, High Country News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, PBS MediaShift, The Rumpus, 5280, The Huffington Post, The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals (Vintage, 2012), Dear McSweeney's: Twenty-Two Years of Letters from McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (McSweeney's, 2021), Love In The Time of Time's Up (Tortoise Books, 2022), and Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide (Bower House, 2023). One of her stories was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays, three of her stories were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one received Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize anthology. She's won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Society for Professional Journalists, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. 

Jenny Shank was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club for six years, and for four years she was the Books & Writers Editor of New West, which was named "Best Literary Blog" in the Westword Best of Denver issue. She was a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California. She has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the Boulder Writing Studio, and she is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, daughter, and son.

Read About Jenny:

Interview about Mixed Company with Caitlin Rocket of the Boulder Weekly.

Interview about Mixed Company with Izzy Fincher of CU Independent.

Interview about writing with Paula Younger for Fiction Writers Review.

Interview about writing satire with BeerAdvocate magazine.

Interview by fiction writer Steven Wingate on Fiction Writers Review.

Interview by novelist Craig Lancaster on A Mind Adrift in the West.

Radio & Television Interviews:

Interview with Ryan Warner on Colorado Public Radio's Colorado Matters.

Interview with Chérie Newman on Montana Public Radio's The Write Question.

Interview on the Broomfield Public Library's Off The Page public cable show.

Interview on The Denver Diatribe podcast.

Interview on Take Two, a show on Los Angeles NPR affiliate KPCC, about the potential for used e-book sales.