Writing professor.
Memoirist.
Naturalist.
Long before I started writing on a laptop, I was scribbling stories and poems anywhere I could. Words felt like magic to me. They still do.
I write about the small, ordinary moments that quietly shape who we are — whether that’s a nineteen-year-old refusing to disappear into illness, or a child watching the moon linger over breakfast and wondering if it wants some.
Featured Essay — Zibby Owens · Between Chapters
“Twenty Years of Firsts Didn’t Prepare Me for This”
Selected by Zibby Owens for her Between Chapters vertical in June 2026, this essay explores the milestone moments that catch you off guard — and what it means to arrive somewhere you didn’t know you were heading.
Read the Essay“The milestones we rehearse for are never the ones that undo us.”
Studies in Storytelling
I am a writing professor at Stony Brook University, teaching students across all majors to find the words for what only they can say. A former Children’s Literature Fellow at the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook Southampton, where I studied under the mentorship of Emma Walton Hamilton, I also hold a certificate in Narrative and Creative Writing for Nonfiction from Cornell University.
In Magazines, Media, and More
My essays have appeared in Coping Magazine, Business Insider, HuffPost, and Elephants and Tea. In June 2026, Zibby Owens selected my work for her Between Chapters vertical. I am also at work on a memoir about first love, rare illness, and the decades of silence that follow.
I have several completed picture book manuscripts spanning fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid, most rooted in the everyday wonders of the natural world and the people who protect it. Drawing on my life as a mother of four, I write stories that celebrate what happens when you stop and look: at the moon still hanging in the morning sky, at the praying mantis on the garden wall, at the starling murmuration that stops our whole family mid-trail. My work explores nature, family, neurodiversity, and the joy hiding in plain sight.
From Survivorship to Student Voices
Having survived a rare melanoma diagnosis as a teenager — likely among the first patients my age to undergo early clinical trials that would later become standard immunotherapy — I am committed to cancer awareness among young people as a member of the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau.
I volunteer as faculty advisor to my campus chapter of the Oncology Society — a role that sits at the intersection of survivorship, education, and student voice.
Head Toward the Sky
I am a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, serving on its Education Committee and as a judge for its youth writing contests and scholarship awards — because I believe we don’t simply observe the natural world. We belong to it. My nature writing is rooted in wonder and shaped by belonging: the kind that turns a dragonfly into a character, a morning walk into a meditation, and a mama bear on the side of a mountain road into a story you carry home with you.
Recent Highlights
All Essays & Publications →The Youngest One Is Graduating. I Didn’t Expect to Feel This Way.
On watching your youngest cross the stage — and what it means when the chapter of raising children quietly closes behind you.
Read →What It Means to Live on the Other Side of a Rare Diagnosis
Writing about long-term survivorship for the AYA cancer community: the silence that comes after treatment ends, and what it takes to speak again.
Read →What Survivorship Means to Me
A reflection on identity, cancer, and what it means to be standing here — offered through the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau.
Read →
Jennifer Young 