ABOUT JEN
Jen Soriano (she/they) is a Filipinx-American lyric essayist and performer living on unceded Duwamish territory in Seattle. They are the author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and the lyric essay collection Nervous, now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Melissa Febos has called Jen’s work “powerful and luminous” and chose her essay “Unbroken Water” as winner of the 2019 Penelope C. Niven Prize from the Center for Women Writers. Aisha Sabatini-Sloan chose her essay “War-Fire” as winner of the 2019 Fugue Prose Prize, calling her work “vivid” and “cinematic”. Jen was also chosen as a prose finalist in the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, judged by Leslie Jamison.
Jen has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. They are particularly proud to have been selected as a Jack Jones Yi Dae Up Fellow, thanks to a scholarship founded by Alexander Chee in honor of his grandmother. She is co-editor of Amanda Solomon Amorao and DJ Kuttin Kandi’s anthology Closer to Liberation: Pin[a/x]y Activism in Theory and Practice. She is also the author of "Multiplicity From the Margins," published by Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, which explores the potential of intersectional form to disrupt oppressive narratives and expand narrow worldviews.
Jen was the 2022-2023 poet in residence with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. She holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in nonfiction and fiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She works as an organizational development consultant and narrative strategist for social justice institutions, and is a co-founder of the digital rights and narrative power building organizations MediaJustice and ReFrame.