Jennifer Finney Boylan is a widely praised author and professor. Edward Albee summed up her oeuvre in 1988: -- "Boylan observes carefully, and with love. [Her] levitating wit is wisely tethered to a humane concern…. I often broke into laughter, and was now and again, struck with wonder."

Jenny's memoir, She's Not There, published by Doubleday in 2003, was the first bestselling work by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan.

Jenny has been a frequent guest on a number of national television and radio programs, including three visits to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has also appeared on the Larry King Show, The Today Show and been the subject of a documentary on CBS' 48 Hours. She has also appeared on a wide range of local and syndicated television shows, as well as NPR's Marketplace and the Diane Rehm show.

She is also an ongoing contributor to Conde Nast Traveler magazine; her most recent work there concerned the islands of Casco Bay, Maine, in the July 2005 issue; a story about the Turks and Caicos islands is slated for February 2006. Jenny has also contributed articles to GQ, People, Allure, and Glamour. Her column, "There From Here," appears on Sundays in the papers of the Central Maine newspaper chain.

Boylan's first book, a collection of stories entitled Remind Me To Murder You Later, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. Her stories presented characters - sometimes fictional, sometimes interpretations of living people - faced with atypical dilemmas either as a result of the spinning forces of life or else by their own hands.

Her style would first achieve national attention in 1991, when her first novel, The Planets, was published by Poseidon Press. (Simon and Schuster). Loosely based upon the classical piece of music by Gustav Holst, The Planets followed the lives of several fictional characters in the real town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which has been afflicted by an underground coal fire for several decades and houses few remaining residents. When one woman commits suicide while skydiving, she sets into effect a chain reaction of events involving other residents of the burning town.

Picking up six years after The Planets concluded, The Constellations follows the lives of several of the characters from The Planets, along with a generous helping of new, strange people. The Constellations, published in 1994 by Random House, is just as energetic as its precursor, as characters flee from angry cows, discover a latex brain, and begin a life of dognapping.

Her 1997 novel, Getting In, published by Warner Books, focused on four high school students who go on quests to get into college. The novel was optioned for film by Renny Harlin and Geena Davis, and Jenny was tapped to write the initial screenplay.

Boylan's books have been widely praised by many respected critics, writers and publications, including Barth, Albee, Richard Russo, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday and Entertainment Weekly. Her stories have appeared in such literary magazines as Confrontation, Florida Review, Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Writer's Digest and Southwest Review.

Born in 1958 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Boylan grew up in Newtown Square and Devon, Pennsylvania.

She graduated from Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) in 1980. From there she moved to New York, where she was the managing editor of American Bystander magazine, the short-lived "American Punch" founded by the first cast of "Saturday Night Live" and an ad-hoc group of New Yorker cartoonists and SCTV actors and writers. Upon the demise of American Bystander in 1982, Boylan became an editorial assistant at Viking/Penguin, working for the managing editor of the Viking Press. Boylan followed with a stint as the production editor of the fiction line at E.P. Dutton until 1985.

In late 1986, Boylan began a master's program at the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she worked with John Barth, Edward Albee, Doris Grumback and John Irwin. She taught at Johns Hopkins for several years after getting her degree, and then joined the faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she has been ever since.

Since 1988, Jenny Boylan has beena professor of creative writng and American literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. Boylan was a visiting professor at University College Cork, Ireland, in 1998-99. She was promoted to the rank of full Professor in May of 2001, and was chosen by students as the Charles Walker Bassett "Professor of the Year" in 2000. At present she is Director of Creative Writing at Colby.   

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