Jill Swenson

Jill Swenson brings nearly 30 years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching nonfiction writers and authors to publication. With a PhD from The University of Chicago, she taught journalism at the University of Georgia-Athens and media criticism at Ithaca College; and learned the coaching method from Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry at the Poynter Institute. After the events of September 11, 2001, she walked away from the golden handcuffs of tenure for real intellectual freedom. Swenson took up small-scale sustainable farming and lived off-the-grid in the Finger Lakes for a decade while free-lancing for Back Home Magazine, Small Farm Quarterly, and local newspapers. Since 2011, she has worked as a developmental editor with historians, scholars, scientists, photographers, journalists, artists, bloggers, and those who write from expertise and experience. Her personal essay, “Crazy Chick Waiting for a Collect Call from the Sundance Kid,” was published in a recent issue of Healing Muse. Jill Swenson lives outside Ithaca, NY, at the top of Buffalo Hill in the Shindagin Hollow State Forest. Her current work-in-progress is based on the Kakaygeesick family, dispossessed of their ancestral land to build the new Seven Clans Casino in Warroad, Minnesota, on Lake of the Woods.