Photo credit: Ellen Wertheim
Joanne Jacobson grew up in the Midwest and has lived in France, Vermont, and New York City. Her writing has evolved out of the literary and cultural criticism of her academic training, into creative nonfiction—and has remained concerned with the emotional texture of change, and with language as a source of human resiliency.
Jacobson has published three books: a monograph on the politics of letter writing in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S., Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); a memoir on growing up in post-World War II suburbia, Hunger Artist: A Suburban Childhood (Bottom Dog Press, 2007); and a creative nonfiction volume that places into dialogue with one another her mother’s chronic lung disease and her own blood disorder, Every Last Breath: A Memoir in Two Illnesses (University of Utah Press, 2020). Her memoir essays and her critical essays, on topics ranging from literature and culture of the Midwest to American photography and to Tupperware, have appeared in such publications as New England Review, Gastronomica, The Nation, BOMB, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre and Bellevue Literary Review. Her writing has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Jacobson holds an A.B. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, in American Studies and in American Civilization. She has taught courses in American literature and culture and in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Angers (France) and Middlebury College; at Yeshiva University, where she also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Yeshiva College; and in the Bioethics and Humanities Program at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Since retiring from full-time teaching, she has lived in Evanston, Illinois.