Essays & Publications

Topic Sentence: Inspiring Words from 18 Wise Women

Selected alongside seventeen other women for Zibby Owens’s Between Chapters platform, this piece features Jennifer’s reflections on a chapter of motherhood closing and what it means to find yourself standing at the start all over again.

Twenty Years of Firsts Didn’t Prepare Me for This

Selected by Zibby Owens for her Between Chapters platform, 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.

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 a chapter of raising children begins to quietly close behind you.

What Survivorship Means to Me

A reflection on identity, diagnosis, and what it means to be standing here, offered through the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau.

The Cancer Left a Hole in My Head. Here’s What No One Told Me About Living With It.

A candid personal essay on what long-term survivorship of head and neck melanoma actually looks like — the pain, the concealment, and the slow work of learning to stop hiding.

My Scar, My Story

At 19, melanoma left a lime-sized hole in the back of her head. That scar tells a story Jennifer spent decades stashing away beneath metal hairpins, long sleeves, and borrowed denial.

Nineteen Again: A Survivor’s Full-Circle Moment

When her daughter turned 19, Jennifer was struck by a strange sensation of watching herself walk through a doorway she once stood in, the age she was diagnosed with stage III melanoma. A meditation on survivorship, memory, and the quiet miracle of being here.

My Daughter and I Work Side by Side in Our Home Office

On the unexpected intimacy of sharing a workspace with a grown child and what it looks like when the ordinary refuses to stay quiet.

Magic in Everyday Moments

This essay won Visit Orlando’s Most Magical Gathering contest, selected from more than 52,000 entries.