Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 19 books, including Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult. Her memoir, She’s Not There, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. Since 2014, she has been the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; she is also on the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy. She is the President of PEN America, and from 2011 to 2018 she was a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, including four years as national co-chair. In 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She graduated from Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins, and holds doctorates honoris causa from Sarah Lawrence College, the New School, and Wesleyan University. For many years she was Contributing Opinion Writer for the opinion section of the New York Times. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, LitHub, Downeast, and many other publications. She lives in Maine and New York with her wife Deirdre. They have two children, a daughter, Zai, and a son, Sean.