Jess Row
Jess Row (born October 25, 1974) is an American short story writer, novelist, and professor. He earned a BA in English from Yale University in 1997 and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2001. He taught English in Hong Kong for two years before focusing on writing.
His debut novel, Your Face in Mine (2014), centers on racial reassignment surgery in a post-industrial Baltimore. Row’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Witness, The Atlantic, and Kyoto Journal, and they were included in Best American Short Stories in 2001 and 2003.
He has taught English at The College of New Jersey and is a professor of English at New York University. He also taught in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Row studies and practices Zen Buddhism.
Row has received many awards, including a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. In 2018 he won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for his book White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination, and he is a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sonya Posmentier, and their two children.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:14 (CET).