Jenna Blum
| Jenna Blum | |
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| Born | Jenna Blum |
| Occupation | author, educator |
| Alma mater | Kenyon College B.A. Boston University M.A. |
| Genre | fiction writing |
| Notable awards | Charles Monroe Coffin Prize[1] Harold U. Ribalow Prize[1][2] |
| Website | |
| jennablum |
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Jenna Blum (born c. 1970) is an American writer notable for her novels Those Who Save Us[3][4] and The Stormchasers.[5] In 2013 she was selected by the Modern Scholar series to teach an audio lecture course entitled The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction.[6] In addition, Blum leads novelists as part of the Grub Street writing center, a Boston-based workshop for writers.[7][8] She was named as a favorite woman writer by Oprah magazine.[9]
Career
Blum grew up with a Jewish father and part-German mother in the United States.[1] She published her first short story entitled Fifth Wheel in Seventeen magazine's National Fiction Contest when she was fourteen years old, and won third prize.[1] In 1986, her short story The Legacy of Frank Finklestein won first prize; Blum was sixteen.[9] She lived in Minnesota for four years and worked with the Shoah Foundation.[1] She earned a bachelor's degree from Kenyon College in 1992 and earned a master's degree from Boston University in 1997. She taught creative writing and communications writing at Boston University, and was the editor at Boston University's AGNI literary magazine for four years.[1] Blum also taught fiction and novel workshops for Grub Street Writers in Boston since 1997 and contributes to the Writer on the Road column for Grub Street's online periodical Grub Daily. Blum's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Faultline, The Kenyon Review, The Bellingham Review, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and The Improper Bostonian. Her first novel Those Who Save Us was published in hardcover by Harcourt in 2004 and in paperback in 2005 and explored how non-Jewish Germans dealt with the Holocaust; according to one account, it shows the “grace and brutality of human interaction in desperate times,” and was described as having “wonderful prose” with “strongly developed characters.”[10] It was a New York Times bestseller[8][11] as well as the bestselling book in the Netherlands for one year.[12] A panel of judges including Elie Wiesel and N. Scott Momaday in conjunction with Hadassah magazine awarded Blum the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for excellence in Jewish-themed literature for this novel.[2] She is an avid reader.
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When I open a novel, I desperately want to be seduced by the book. It’s great if the author can bring me along on the ride of the story. ... I devour books. There are probably things that people who read more slowly extract from a book that I, in my impatience, don’t get from them. When I have the luxury of time, I can read three or four books a week.
— Jenna Blum in The Boston Globe, 2011[11]
Blum described how she researched her novel The Stormchasers:
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When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties and my mom lived there too, I used to take her stormchasing--by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm. This resulted, predictably, in disasters like us crouching in an abandoned barn with a tornadic storm coming on and the animals running like heck in the other direction (geese run; I have seen this!) ... I went stormchasing with people who knew what they were doing. ... We see lots of tornadoes. Safely.
— Jenna Blum in Psychology Today, 2011[12]
Publications
- Those Who Save Us, Harcourt, 2004
- The Stormchasers, Dutton/Penguin, 2010
- The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction, The Modern Scholar, 2013
- The Lucky One (novella), in anthology Grand Central, Penguin, 2014 (not yet released)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Elaine Durbach, November 11, 2007, New Jersey Jewish News, Author's roots yield best-selling novel, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...Born of a Jewish father and a German mother, she grew up in the United States...”
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lee Abramowitz, November 09, 2005, Hadassah Magazine, Author Jenna Blum Wins 2005 Ribalow Prize, Accessed Feb. 5, 2014, "... 2005 Harold U. Ribalow Prize to Jenna Blum, author of Those Who Save Us. ... the Ribalow Prize is given annually to an author who has created an outstanding work of fiction ... panel of judges included Elie Wiesel, N. Scott Momaday, ..."
- ↑ May 31, 2013, Chicago Tribune, St. Luke's Page-turners, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “..Those Who Save U by Jenna Blum...”
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Nancy Harris, The Boston Globe, 2014, Inner and outer turbulence in ‘The Stormchasers’, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...I was surprised to discover that bipolar disorder was really at the heart of this exciting story...”
- ↑ 2013, Recorded Books, The Modern Scholar, The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction by Jenna Blum, ISBN 978-1-4703-8437-1
- ↑ Jenna Blum, April 27, 2013, The Boston Globe, Henriette Lazaridis Power: A first-time novelist giving back, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jan Gardner, The Boston Globe, July 4, 2010, Empowering writers, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...Since its inception in 1997, 53 instructors, including New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum, and 22 students have published books. In recent months, the pace has picked up...”
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Melissa Hellstern, Oprah Magazine, February 26, 2010, Your Favorite Women Writers, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...Jenna Blum began her career with a first prize in Seventeen magazine's National Fiction Contest...”
- ↑ Nancy Harris, The Boston Globe, November 18, 2010, Inspiring connections, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Amy Sutherland, May 15, 2011, The Boston Globe, The fast and the furious, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...It may have taken Jenna Blum five tries to get into Boston University’s graduate writing program, but it only took her one novel, Those Who Save Us, to land on The New York Times bestseller list. Her most recent book, The Stormchasers, ...”
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Jennifer Haupt, April 28, 2011, Psychology Today, Jenna Blum: Write what you know about, live what you write about, Accessed Feb. 5, 2014, "... now keeping it lofted on the Dutch bestseller list..."
