Jennifer Lunden

Jennifer Lunden

Jennifer Lunden is the author of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. A chapter from the book—which blends memoir, history, science and social criticism to explore the health hazards of industrial capitalism—was a Maine Literary Awards finalist, and her essay, “Evidence,” also a finalist, received a notable mention in Best American Essays. In 2020 her essay “Fugitive Justice” was the winner of the Maine Literary Awards short works competition in nonfiction.

Lunden’s creative nonfiction has been published in Longreads, Orion, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, and DIAGRAM; her fiction in Eclectica, and Wigleaf; and poems in Sweet Lit, Peacock Journal, The Café Review, and other journals. In May 2015, accompanied by a circle of six dancers, she performed an original poem with Esduardo Mariscal Dance Theater, and in February 2020 Maine poet laureate Stuart Kestenbaum read her poem “In February” on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here.

Her work has been anthologized in True Stories, Well Told: From The First 20 Years Of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide And Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses. Her paper about the intersection of industrial capitalism and health as viewed through the lens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was selected for the scholarly collection Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts.

The winner of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts, Lunden is the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts grants, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, and fellowships from Monson Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dora Maar House in France.

She and her husband, the artist Frank Turek, live in a little house on the Portland peninsula, where they keep four chickens, two cats, and one Great Dane.

Author photo by Travis Widrick.