Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill is an American author of both children’s and adult literature. Before beginning her authorial career, Offill earned degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. She worked various jobs, including as a ghostwriter, a fact checker, and a medical transcriber, and also has a rich teaching background, including as an MFA program instructor at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Queens University of Charlotte. Offill also taught at Vassar College, Pratt University, and as the Writer-in-Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. She also has editorial experience and most notably, co-edited two essay anthologies with Elissa Schappell.

Offill has published four children’s books and three full-length novels. Her children’s titles include 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2010), Eleven Experiments That Failed (2011), Sparky!, (2014), and While You Were Napping (2014). She has also had work published in the Paris Review, Electric Literature, and Significant Objects.

Offill published her first literary novel Last Things in 1999. The novel established Offill as a new voice on the literary stage and introduced her now iconic style. Last Things “mines an interval of childhood before the division of intellectual labor” and incorporates many of the same thematic elements of her subsequent two titles, Dept.