About
Jessica Roeder is a 2025 McKnight Writer Fellow. She has won a Pushcart Prize, a Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist grant, a Writers at Work fellowship, and an earlier McKnight fellowship. The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council has supported her work in dance.
Her prose chapbook Staircases Will Outnumber Us is available from Red Bird, and a poetry chapbook, Trees Full of Walking, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her writing has appeared in Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and many other magazines. A new story is forthcoming in Ploughshares.
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Learn more about some of Jessica’s roles
Writer: Jessica is interested in storytelling, character, voice and rhythm, and how people survive, together and alone. She writes fiction, poetry, essays, and between-genre prose.
Writing teacher and learning designer: Jessica designs and teaches writing classes for people of all experience levels and ambitions. She teaches through community organizations; she has also designed and taught courses for undergraduates and graduate students. Her generative classes help writers create new drafts. In critique-based classes, a small community of writers works together so that everyone can return to, and move forward with, work in progress. You can check out a small learning design project on point of view here.
Dance teacher: Her modern dance classes take place at Raise the Barre in Duluth, Minnesota. She has been teaching dance for people with Parkinson’s and their families since 2012. She trained as a teaching artist with Dance for PD® and with ArtSage, a Minnesota nonprofit advocating for accessible, enriching participatory arts programs for older adults.
Copyeditor and proofreader: Jessica copyedits and proofreads for literary book publishers, primarily in poetry and fiction.
Community gatherer: Jessica hosts free silent writing sessions via Zoom. Please get in touch if you are interested.