Jessie Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize winning writer, editor, and educator. Her debut essay collection, This Middle Living, was selected as the winner of the 2026 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming from Autumn House Press. She was also selected by Melissa Febos as the winner of the Kenyon Review’s Nonfiction Contest and by Brian Turner as the winner of the Indiana Review’s Half K Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, Bellingham Review, The Common, her Substack “Claiming Writerhood,” and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship at The Kenyon Review and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale Residency.

Jessie studied Psychology and Chemistry at Duke University. She is currently Director of Strategy at The New York Times and an incoming Writer in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing. She is an amateur flying trapeze artist and cares deeply about her friends.