Jill Christman is a 2020 NEA Prose Fellow and the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays and two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of the AWP Prize for CNF) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood, and The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (coming out from the University of Nebraska Press on March 1, 2026).Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, The Rumpus, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A professor in the Department of English at Ball State University, Jill teaches creative nonfiction writing and literary editing, directs the Writer-in-Residence Program, and serves as the senior editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a weekly online magazine of micro essays).

A graduate of the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Jill has worked as a cook at a kayak school on the Rogue River in southern Oregon, programmed pixelated birdies to flap in circles as a research assistant in a cognitive psychology lab in Eugene, traveled the Alabama backroads to count potted meats for the USDA, and somewhat more recently, served on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and taught creative nonfiction writing in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program. She was born during the summer of love in the now defunct Miami Baby Hospital while her older brother watched the largest crocodile in captivity—Cookie—swallow live chickens at the also obsolete Serpentarium.

She lives with her family in Muncie, Indiana.