Jennifer Jackson duBois is a novelist from Massuchesetts; she has been with Texas State since 2013, and an Associate Professor of English since 2015 when she won the Alpha Chi Favorite Professor Award. DuBois teaches creative writing at the undergraduate level, as well as MFA fiction workshops and literature seminars. She has been awarded several honors including the Williston Northampton Alumni Trailblazer Award in 2017, the Texas State Presidential Distinction Award in 2019, and the College of Liberal Arts Achievement Award for Excellence in Scholarly/Creative Activity in 2020.
Before she came to Texas State, duBois received a BA from Tufts University, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and was a Stanford University Stegner Fellow. duBois served as a tutor, instructor, and lecturer during her MFA program and Stanford fellowship; additionally, she was selected to teach a competitive undergraduate fiction workshop at the University of Iowa, as well as receiving a competitive teaching-writing fellowship the year before.
As early as 2008, duBois’s work began hitting the wide world of publications, her short stories and essays being featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Playboy, Salon, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, The South Carolina Review, The Florida Review, and The Northwest Review, to name a few. In 2012, duBois presented her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, “loosely based on Garry Kasparov” and set against the sociopolitical upheaval and transition of Russia over the past three decades. This debut won critical acclaim earning her the California Book Award for First Fiction, Northern California Book Award for Fiction, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award; the book was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her next book, Cartwheel, “borrowed themes from the Amanda Knox case” and earned the Housatonic Book Award for fiction as well as making it as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Her third novel, The Spectators, was inspired by the backstory of a “beloved progressive politician before he became the king of trash TV.” The Spectators won recognition from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation as well as a grant and recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts; the book was also published in Spain as Los Espectadores. Her most recent novel, The Last Language, was published in 2023 and “actually began with a set of philosophy of language questions” tinged with “the desire to write a love story with a serious intellectual plot.” This latest novel has received positive reviews from Kirkus (starred review), Publisher’s Weekly, and Shelf Awareness.
A fifth novel is in the works, “but it feels like there’s a core question still missing from this novel idea” – and questions are vital to duBois’s works that are “not trying to persuade a reader of a set of answers as much as interest them in a set of questions.” Through techniques of “Secrets, Suspense, and Revelation” (one of her original Problems Seminars) as well as narrative strategies (like conflicting or unreliable narrators), duBois engages with controversial issues of politics and ethics that captures the complexity of a complicated world. The characters and settings in her novels are all uniquely distinct, dealing with different shades of disability, identity, scandal, and crime that insist the reader “sit with their own conclusions, but also with the infallibility of those conclusions … [to] consider the possibility their own interpretation was wrong, and what it would mean in the moral universe of the book if they were.” Each novel draws from real-life events that “sparked or engaged with some deeper question” that duBois found baffling: “how do you proceed in the face of a lost cause? How fundamentally can a person change over the course of a lifetime? And how is it that reasonably intelligent, well-intentioned people can look at the exact same set of events and come away with wildly divergent, yet similarly confident, interpretations?”
The importance of considering these sorts of questions is reflected in the original courses created by duBois which explore various Problems in Language and Literature such as narrative structure, ethics and politics in fiction, and the first-person novel. Over the course of her career in English studies and the many theses she has advised and supervised, duBois seeks- to model “intellectual curiosity and openness – the idea that diversity of literature is a gift, that no work of art is for everyone but any work of art might be for anyone.”
