Jenessa Abrams is a writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. She currently works as a Features Writer at Tasting Table.
Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Tin House, Electric Literature, Eater, Guernica, The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, and anthologies including Platypus Press’s Shorts Volume II and Off Assignment’s Letters To A Stranger. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from MacDowell, where she was named the Nadya Aisenberg Fellow, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation.
As a member of Columbia University’s Word for Word program, she partnered with emerging French artist, Elise Galmard, whose work she translated from French to English. Those translations, portions of a series of queer feminist monologues, have been published in The Brooklyn Rail and The Offing.
She serves on the Advisory Board of Off Assignment, a magazine of literary travel writing, and on the Board of Directors of New Neighbors Partnership, a New York-based non-profit that helps newly arrived refugees connect to local community resources.
Recently, she earned a Master of Science degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She now teaches writing in the program.
