About

Jess Bowers lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English at Maryville University. But she’s originally from York, Pennsylvania, the first capital of the United States (so they claim) and hometown of the 90s rock band Live (that one’s true).

Her debut collection, HORSE SHOW, was published by Santa Fe Writers Project, and recently named one of “The Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collections of 2024” by Electric Literature.

Her short fiction has also appeared in The Portland Review, cream city review, Redivider, StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, Zone 3, Oyez Review, and other journals, been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Award, and other honors. She won Laurel Review‘s Midwest Short Fiction Prize and the Winter Anthology Prize, which was pretty cool.

She’s also a co-editor at Cartridge Lit, an online journal publishing literature about video games, which she’s loved since she first played Fishing Derby on her Atari 2600.

Bowers holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Goucher College, an M.A. in the same from Hollins University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri, where she studied fiction writing, film, and 19th-century literature and visual culture.

In her free time, she thinks about the hungry ghosts of silent Hollywood while riding her little yellow pony through the woods. She also watches far too much T.V.