Jennifer Cody Epstein is a novelist, journalist, and educator who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction—The Madwomen of Paris (Ballantine, 2023), Wunderland (Ballantine, 2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (W.W. Norton, 2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (W.W. Norton, 2007)—has been published in 21 countries to date, nominated for an Edgar award, longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize, and awarded the Honor Prize for Fiction by the Asian Pacific Association of Librarians. She has also been awarded writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Catwalk Arts Institute.
Jennifer has an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University and a Masters of International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS. She did her undergraduate work at Amherst College, where she graduated magna cum laude with a double degree in English and Asian Studies. In addition to writing fiction, she has contributed to LitHub, BookRiot, McSweeney’s, Tablet, Knight-Ridder Financial News, The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Nation (Thailand), Self, and Mademoiselle among other publications, and worked at the NBC and HBO networks; jobs that have taken her from Tokyo to Hong Kong to Bangkok to New York. She has taught fiction and advised graduate thesis projects at Columbia University in New York, in addition to working extensively as a writing coach with students in primary school, middle school, high school and college around the globe.
When not researching, writing or teaching, Jennifer can usually be found reading, running (slowly, and usually to an Audiobook), hiking with her daughters, or spending time with her husband and Mei, their sweet but highly-distractible Springer Spaniel.