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Jenna Devany Waters

Writer. Mother. Activist. Wanderer.
Master list-maker; minor revolutionary.
She/Her.

Piles of Books

Home: Welcome

Recent Essays

A cluster of pale pink cherry blossoms and dark pink buds

"On Wandering, Cherry Trees, Mother's Day, and Rot"

Terrain.org

"More than 40,000 ornamental cherry trees grace the walking paths of New York City. Yet somehow I had lived 30 years without knowing a single thing about them."

a halved peach laying on a neutral-toned surface

"Peaches and Preservation"

Orion Magazine

"In the summer of 2021, I strapped my two small children into the car and drove twelve hundred miles through hurricane rains and clouds of wildfire ash to can peaches with a woman I was terrified of falling in love with."

tree trunk with many rings and fissures

Alaska Quarterly Review

"There are many things which might cause a tree to become hollow. These wounds are not always apparent to a casual observer. Sometimes a tree looks dead but is in fact thriving. Sometimes, it seems as magical as a fantasia, but inside it is infected; destabilized; succumbing to rot."

Mother Tiger reclining and staring at the camera, with her cub on her back

"The Wisdom of No Escape"

Under the Sun

"Outside your window, sirens crest and fall. Later you will speak of waves and surges, overflows and inundations. You will give the virus the language of water while the oceans rise around you, lapping at your calves. Time will add context. But this is before."

Work

Home: Contact

Wild Side West Bio PIc.jpg

Jenna Devany Waters is a queer writer, teacher, and single mother extraordinaire. After 12 years of deadlifting strollers down subway staircases in Manhattan, she has recently relocated to a 120-year-old farmhouse in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest, where her nearest neighbors are cows, corvids and coyotes.

Her writing has appeared or is soon forthcoming in Orion, Alaska Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, Under the Sun, The Citron Review, JMWW and MUTHA Magazine.

She is currently at work on a memoir about motherhood, divorce, and a ten-thousand-mile road trip to the last lesbian bars
in America.

Contact

devanywaters@gmail.com

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