Jennie Shortridge

I was born in North Dakota but spent most of my life in Denver, Colorado until my husband Matt and I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2002. We live on top of a lively, verdant hill in the city of Seattle with our three-legged cat, Baz. I've been a full-time writer since 1995, and a working musician for even longer. My band, The Rejections, is made up of authors and their spouses, and we play for literary events around the Seattle area. In 2009, my friend Garth Stein and I cofounded a nonprofit collective of authors, called Seattle7Writers, that brought together the reading and writing communities and raised money and awareness for literacy and literary organizations. We retired Seattle7Writers in 2019, after giving it all we had for 10 years. After writing five novels, I embarked on writing a memoir about trauma, mental illness, and family. As you can imagine, it's a difficult project, but I remain steadfastly working on it each day in my small home office, Baz sitting in the window, rain often pattering outside. I hope to have it ready for readers before too long.