About

Jess Wells is the author of nine volumes of work: five collections of short stories and four novels. Her latest story collection, The Disappearing Andersons of Loon Lake, is an audio book she narrated. Previous work includes two historical novels, A Slender Tether, a fictive biography of Christine de Pizan, who was a revolutionary intellectual of the Middle Ages; and The Mandrake Broom, a factually accurate dramatization of the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch burning times in Europe 1465 to 1540. She is the winner of a San Francisco Art Commission Grant for Literature and a four-time finalist for the national Lambda Literary Award. Her work is included in dozens of anthologies and literary journals including New Millennium Writing, and The Owen Wister Review.

Featured Work

The Disappearing Andersons of Loon Lake

2017

Love, loss, irony and humor abound in the lives of eight families living around Loon Lake, a shallow fishing spot in Northern Michigan. Wells’ “use of language is like music,” critics says, while others call her writing “a rich and varied drug,” and these stories convey “a real sense of the contradiction and the ambivalence that goes on within the family circle…through writing that has a lyrical style.” Whether it’s the story of a young dreamer and a bully, a man looking forward to retirement and the family that stands in his way; a teacher facing ethical choices, or a family coping with disaster, these stories delight.

Other Works

  • A Slender Tether

    2013

  • The Mandrake Broom

    2007

  • The Price of Passion

    1999

  • AfterShocks

    1992

  • Two Willow Chairs

    1987

  • The Dress, The Cry, and a Shirt with No Seams

    1984

  • The Sharda Stories

    1982

  • A Herstory of Prostitution in Western Europe (nonfiction)

    1982

  • Run

    1981

Awards and Recognition

  • The San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature