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My debut title MUSICAL CHAIRS is now available:

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Product Description

Musical Chairs explores one family's history of mental health diagnoses and searches to define the cusp between a '90s working-class childhood and the trouble of adapting to a comfortable life in the suburbs. In order to understand her restlessness, Jennifer reflects on years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement. Inspired by the least likely source, the family she left behind, Jennifer struggles towards reconciliation. This story is about identity, class, family ties, and the elusive nature of mental illness.

UPCOMING INTERVIEW ~ Jen Knox discusses her new title Musical Chairs

REVIEWS

Jen Knox is an exceptionally gifted storyteller, who can take the events of the past and craft them invariably into engaging and compelling narratives.

--Phillip Lopate, Author of Notes on Sontag

--Gretchen A. Phillips, Pearson Education

With her unique voice, Jen tells the poignant, yet raw, story of her journey to adulthood, living on the streets as a runaway and her ultimate struggle to establish her own identity as a woman who truly values herself. This is one of those books that lingers long after the last page.

--Heather McIntosh, author of Small Animals First

Jen’s a runner, a runaway. Following in the footsteps of her great grandmother, Glory, who defiantly set out on her own near the same young age, and finding commonalities of mental illnesses among the women in her family, Jen must’ve realized her course was set out for her organically.

In the writing of Musical Chairs, a memoir blatant and unapologetic, Jen attempts to make sense of herself within the larger family history.  Yet, for all of the similarities Jen discovered between herself and Glory, there is at least one difference: Glory ran away from family, while Jen’s running brought the both of them back.

--Jennifer Lynne Roberts, playwright and writer, author of Beekeeper and Book of Taos

Jen Knox is a fiction editor at Our Stories Literary Journal and writing tutor at San Antonio College. She attends The Writing Workshops at Bennington College (graduation date: January 2010).  Jen’s writing has won the John Kessler Memorial Endowment for the Arts Award, and has been published in The Current, Flashquake, Kate, SLAB, Spring Street, Slow Trains, and Quiz & Quill, and she received honorable mention in the 2008 Glimmer Train “Family Matters Competition” and 2009 Glimmer Train “Fiction Open Contest.” Jen lives in San Antonio, Texas.