About

I’m Jessie Roy, a queer fiction writer, teacher, and editor.

I hold an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University and a PhD in English with creative dissertation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I was a Distinguished Dissertation Fellow and Fiction Editor for the literary magazine Cream City Review. My short fiction has appeared in American Literary Review and The Journal, and my novel manuscript Brides was honored as First Runner-Up in the 2020 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. I currently teach in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

When I’m not writing, you can find me designing and sewing my own clothes.

Writing

SHORT FICTION

Interviews

CRAFT WRITING

For my short fiction, I have received three Hopwood Awards, a Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellowship, and was selected as a finalist for the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowships, and the 2019 American Literary Review Fiction Contest. My short story “The Lamentations” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and my unpublished novel manuscript Brides was named First Runner-Up in the 2020 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

I am currently at work on a new novel, A Woman of My Same Name. Rebecca Valentine has just moved back in with her parents, to whom she is closeted, when she begins to receive misdirected emails addressed to a “Mrs. Valentine” who lives in Belfast with her husband and child. Rebecca pieces together this parallel life email by email—reminders for dentist’s appointments, receipts from online shopping, even plane tickets—while her own life closes in around her: from her mother’s depression, to her brother’s drug use and suicide attempts, to the married ex-girlfriend who won’t quite let her go, there seems to be no way out except into the identity of her unwitting doppelganger.

Teaching

Since 2011, I’ve been teaching literature, creative writing, media studies, and composition to high school, college, and non-degree-seeking students both online and in person. At New York University, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I’ve been instructor of record for many undergraduate and graduate courses including:

  • Introduction to Visual Culture
  • Theoretical Synthesis (graduate-level academic writing practicum)
  • Queer and Trans Identity
  • Introduction to Creative Writing
  • College Writing and Research
  • Introduction to College Writing
  • Living Writers (survey of contemporary literature)
  • Representations of Sex and Sexuality 
  • Visual Rhetorical Analysis in Gender and Sexuality

I also served as the primary Fiction Instructor for the Syracuse University Summer College Program in Creative Writing, a two-week intensive course for high school students. In 2019, I co-founded the Milwaukee Queer Writing Project, an organization which partnered with Woodland Pattern Book Center to create writing workshops for young people in Milwaukee public schools. 

I have also taught creative writing courses and offered private coaching through Writers.com. Courses I’ve offered include:

Editorial

In 2019-2020, I served as Fiction Editor for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s nationally distributed literary magazine, Cream City Review.  I have ten years of experience serving as a reader, assistant editor, and editorial committee leader for popular anthologies, textbooks, and literary magazines. Publications I’ve edited or served on the editorial board for include The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 (edited by Dave Eggers with an introduction by David Sedaris), the eighth edition of the textbook Critical Encounters With Texts, and the literary journals Salt Hill and Cream City Review.

I also offer my editorial services on a freelance basis, working directly with writers to provide developmental editing to their prose manuscripts (fiction, creative nonfiction, and academic writing in the humanities). I provide deep, thoughtful analysis of your work and experienced revision suggestions, guiding you toward the most ambitious possible version of your manuscript. For estimates, inquiries, and questions, please email me at jessie.c.roy@gmail.com.

Scholarship

My research focuses on women writers of the early-to-mid 20th century whose work engages with ordinary, gendered embodied experiences like food and fashion.  My objects of study include the works of literary writers like Eileen Chang, MFK Fisher, and Assia Djebar, as well as popular cookbooks, food journalism, and home economics manuals by women like Irma Rombauer, Mary Brooks Picken, and Mimi Sheraton.  I also collect 1930s – 1940s issues of women’s magazines like McCall’s and Woman’s Home Companion and write about serialized fiction and mid-century advertising practices aimed at women.

Recent conference presentations include:

  • “Who’s That Woman?: Follies and the Queer Self” at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2019
  • “The politics of the private in Eileen Chang’s Aloeswood Incense” at the Northeast MLA Conference 2019
  • “Saved from labor: working on the white body in 1930s magazine advertising” at the Pop Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference 2019
  • “Who’s That Woman?: Reconstructing Follies” at Backward Glances 2019

I collect and comment on excerpts from midcentury women’s print culture at my blog, Homemakers’ Chat.