Jessica Dainty is a native New Englander, who has bounced back and forth from the Northeast to Tennessee over the past 20 years. Jessica works as a consulting teacher for special education in her county school system. When she is not writing her own words, she loves helping her students fall in love with reading, especially those who may have given up on it long ago. Additionally, she adjuncts at the local university in both English and Curriculum and Instruction departments, gardens, knits, and spends time with her famiily and animals.

She received her undergraduate from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where she started in poetry. She took her first fiction workshop for the simple reason that it terrified her, and after that, she never looked back. She continued on to earn her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied with Hester Kaplan and AJ Verdelle, among others.

Jessica is drawn to darker literature with a slight silver lining of hope, and her writing reflects this. Her debut novel, THE SHAPE OF THE ATMOSPHERE, is a historical coming of age story set against the backdrop of the early space race about a young girl sent to a private mental institution in the 1950s. Additionally, Jessica’s short stories have been published in various places, including SNReview, Fiction Weekly, Scholars & Rogues, and Composition Cooperative. She is represented by Linda Camacho of Gallt & Zacker.

Connect with Jessica on social media! She’s on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jessicadaintyauthor and Twitter at the handle @daintywriterj3.