Jennifer Kircher Herman

"I may have started out searching for love. But what I didn’t realize that day, that week, even that year, is that my search was larger, longer, more transcendent. I was breaking the pattern of my life from one of ritual to one of experience. I was about to interrupt the primary purpose of my life—raise kids, pay bills, save for retirement—and change it instead into a quest for beauty."

                                                                     - from Art & Longing, Finding Beauty in Seville

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The quest for beauty has become a vital theme in my life. In my work I strive to understand and uncover the human condition—the emotions and yearning and challenges we all face, the desire yet fear to engage with life.   

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I hold an MFA from Emerson College, and am an alumni of the Bread Loaf workshop, the One Story workshop, the Provincetown Fine Arts Center workshop, and the Ploughshares / Emerson College-affiliated Kasteel Well workshop, where I won the Sophie de Liedel fellowship. 

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My fiction is forthcoming in Fiction, and is published in numerous literary journals, including  North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, American Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review, where it also won the Fiction Prize. My non-fiction has been published in Ploughshares online, North American Review online, Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul magazine, Edible Finger Lakes, and Poets & Writers, among others.

 

Out in the world I am a senior manager at a large software company, where I manage documentation for a project based in Copenhagen. My time is shared between western New York, in a little Cape Cod with a garden and mature trees and a piano and a fireplace, and a home in the hills outside Granada, Spain.  When not writing or reading or taking pictures or walking the dog, I am studying art, playing chess, practicing piano, watching how the branches of trees touch the clouds. I used to clean houses and ride horses, and both of those things are finding their way into my work. 

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