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Jessica Anya Blau Fiction Writer

Jessica Anya Blau

Biography Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California.  She attended The University of California, Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area for eight years until she moved to Toronto, Canada.  It was while she was in Canada that Jessica started writing fiction.  She was not granted a work permit (her husband was employed with a Canadian company), had no children and was somewhat at a loss as to how to feel like a productive person.  At first Jessica was writing very long, narrative letters to her friends in California.  Then her husband brought home a giant, clunky computer.  She wrote on that computer every day for a few hours---hundreds of short stories and essays.  She had no printer.  After more than a year, Jessica gave her husband a disc containing all her work and asked him to print it out at his office.  She had no idea what she was going to do with it, she just wanted to see it.  Nothing was saved on the computer.  She didn't even know how to save things on computers.  She didn't even know you could save things on computers.  (She was quite lame in this way.)  Jessica's husband took the disc to work but never brought home the printed pages.  For at least a year, she was waiting for the pages, asking  for them, reminding her husband about them, etc.  Finally, she went down to his office to print them herself and discovered the disc had been lost.  Her husband felt horrible about it, and she was sad for a few days, but then she realized it was all probably awful writing, anyway, as it was her first stuff, and she had never taken a writing class or asked anyone how to write.  After that, Jessica would make a disc for her husband every few weeks so that if the disc were lost, there wouldn't be too much lost work. 

Jessica had a baby in Toronto and stopped writing for about a year while she nursed and hung out with the baby, and hung out with her friends who had babies.  It was a great year, but after a while she had that  familiar need to feel productive, and so she started writing again.

The first story that Jessica sent out was accepted by a Canadian literary magazine.  Jessica was stunned.  It occurred to her then that maybe her writing wasn't so awful, and maybe she could go to a graduate writing program, and maybe she might actually one day BE a writer.   She applied to graduate programs and was accepted into The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  With her then three-year-old daughter, Maddie, Jessica moved to Baltimore.  The first thing she did when she got to Baltimore was to buy a printer for her computer.  Her husband stayed in Canada and they eventually divorced.

Jessica wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote while she was at Hopkins and  during the years after she graduated.  She met David Grossbach, whom she eventually married, and they had a baby, Ella.  During this time she also had about twenty-five short stories published.  Some stories were nominated for prizes (including the Pushcart), some stories won prizes.  She was awarded scholarships for Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers' Conference.  It was while she was at Bread Loaf that she met an editor who said that no one wants to publish a collection of short stories as a first book and that she had to write a novel.  It was while she was at Sewanee that Jessica got the idea for her first novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES.

THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES was published in the summer of 2008 by HarperPerennial.  It is already in the fourth printing.  The book was named a Top Summer Read by The TODAY show, The New York Post and New York Magazine.  Cosmopolitan Magazine listed it as a "Sexy Summer Read."  

Currently, Jessica is working on her second novel that is tentatively titled, HOME FOR THE HEART ATTACK.

Upcoming Works

  • Home for the Heart Attack, a novel in progress

Nickname

  • Jessica

Relationship

  • I'm married to David Grossbach who is a documentary film editor. He also makes political ads during political seasons. He only works for one party.

Family

  • I have two daughters, Maddie and Ella.

Causes I Support

  • Habitat for Humanity

University Affiliation

  • Johns Hopkins

Agents

  • Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. New York, NY

Contact Agents

  • Joanne Brownstein at Brandt and Hochman

Publishers

  • Harper Collins

Contact Publishers

  • Publicist: Alberto Rojas at Harper Collins.

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