Jenny Shank's novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Award. One of her pieces was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays and another received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her fiction, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's Quarterly, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Image, The Onion, Bust, The Toast, Dallas Morning News, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Poets & Writers Magazine, and The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals. She has been a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California and she's won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
I am a member of the National Book Critics Circle and I've published more than a thousand book reviews. I believe that attentive, wide-ranging reading makes us better writers. I love to prescribe the student books to read that enable their manuscripts to develop in conversation with both the classics of their genre and new books being published today. During our semester, we'll read one recently published story or essay together as a class each week and have a conversation online about it, making note of particular craft techniques. As I get to know my students, I share with them calls for submission and opportunities for publication that I think suit their work.
Mentor Statement
As a writer, I find that receiving "general" feedback can be frustrating, so I like to provide very specific comments, breaking down my suggestions for improvements within the whole manuscript, the individual chapter, the specific paragraph, and the sentences themselves. I provide intensive line comments, cheering moments where the writing is strong, and pointing out places that need improvement. I challenge students to dig deeper into the emotions of the characters they write about. Depending on the semester and the needs of the student, I vary my approach from being a productivity cheerleader, encouraging the student to churn out new drafts, to being a developmental editor, working with them to revise manuscripts to refine themes, emotional resonance, and structure. I give all my thesis students in-depth, extensive line edits and comments as well as many pages of overall advice on structure and themes.
I want each of my students to feel they've received an attentive, responsive, helpful read from me about every piece of writing they turn in.
