Jen Cross is a Bay-Area-based writer, performer and workshop facilitator. She writes about sexuality, trauma, and (queer) gender(s), and her writing has appeared in more than 30 anthologies and periodicals, including, most recently, The Healing Art of Writing (Vol. 1), make/shift, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), Best Sex Writing 2008, Nobody Passes, and Best Women's Erotica 2007.
Based in the Bay Area, she's featured/performed at such events as Writers With Drinks, the National Queer Arts Festival, SF Pride, Perverts Put Out, Sizzle, and the Queer Open Mic. She participates annually Carol Queen’s stop on the LitQuake’s LitCrawl, and also gets to co-facilitate with Carol Queen a monthly Erotic Reading Circle at the Center for Sex and Culture. Jen writes to release, transform, and create space for as much un-articulated experience as possible, erotic and otherwise.
Jen’s a certified Amherst Writers and Artists workshop leader and has facilitated writing workshops since 2002. She has worked with writers in the San Francisco Bay Area, primarily through her workshops at Writing Ourselves Whole, and she has also written with: students at Dartmouth College, Goddard College, University of Oregon at Eugene, Brown, and Wesleyan, Pacific School of Religion, and OutRight Portland (ME); survivors of sexual trauma (at San Francisco Women Against Rape, Bay Area Women Against Rape, Survivorship); folks who are living with cancer and other life-threatening illness (at the UCSF Medical Center’s Art for Recovery program); staff at the Office of Medical Education at UCSF; and other groups around the country. She has presented the last three years at the Power of Words/ Transformative Language Arts annual conference in Plainfield, Vermont. She has produced or helped to produce numerous showcases for writers to perform their work publicly, including a collaboration with San Francisco Women Against Rape to present Artists Against Rape 2008.
She received her MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College in 2003, investigating the ways in which erotic writing can be a tool for those recovering from sexual abuse. For more information, visit www.writingourselveswhole.org
