Jennifer Steil

Jennifer Steil is an award-winning author, journalist, and teacher who lives in many countries (currently Uzbekistan/France/UK). Her new novel, Exile Music, released by Viking in May, won the Grand Prize in the international Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and is a Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. It was chosen by Art in Fiction as one of the best novels about art in 2020, and by Book Authority as one of 16 Best New Music Books to Read in 2021. It has received stunning reviews, including a starred Booklist review, and was chosen by Good Morning America as one of the 25 Novels You'll Want to Read This Summer. A reviewer for the Jerusalem Post called it "one of the best novels I have read in a long time,” and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle wrote, “In a sea of Holocaust literature, “Exile Music” stands out as wholly original and engaging.” Her previous novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and the Phillip McMath Post Publication book award. It was shortlisted for both the Bisexual Book Award and the Lascaux Novel Award. The novel has received much acclaim, notably in the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review. Jennifer’s first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Broadway Books, 2010), a memoir about her time as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a, was hailed by The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald. She is now writing a novel about an underground community of LGBTQ artists in Bolivia, as well as a book of essays and an historical novel about Uzbekistan. She has taught creative writing in the MFA program at Rosemont College in Philadelphia, in the BA and MA writing programs at Bournemouth University in the UK, and she teaches online with the Center for Creative Writing. She has worked as a mentor with the AWP’s Writer-to-Writer mentoring program and also coaches privately. She loves helping other writers to produce their best work.

Jennifer can be found at jennifersteil.net.

Charitable Organization: The Julianna Sayler Foundation for DIPG Brain Cancer

Praise

“Cultural binaries fuel this well-plotted, gripping novel” — The New York Times Book Review

“A novel of love, deception and consequences. . . . Richly imagined. . . . Harrowing and brilliant.”
—The Seattle Times
“Jennifer Steil is a conjurer of spells and a resurrector of lives past. In Exile Music she brings to life a little-known chapter of a war that came to define us, & which were still grappling w today. This beautiful book is at once timeless and topical. A great novel.”
—Daniel Torday, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Beautifully narrated…From the very first pages I was swept up.”
—Georgia Hunter, New York Times bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones