Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up, the recently published A Reason to See You Again, and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. She is also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer, which inspired the USA Today bestseller 1000 Words:A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Jami has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. Her work has been published in sixteen languages.

Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published in 2006, followed by the novels The Kept Man and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, was published in October 2012. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and was published in ten countries in 2013. It was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. Her fifth book, Saint Mazie, was described by The New York Times Book Review as, “full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.” Her sixth book, All Grown Up, was a national bestseller, appearing on numerous year-end lists. Her most recent novel, All This Could Be Yours, for which Kirkus dubbed her, “poet laureate of difficult families,” also appeared on a number of year-end lists. In 2022 she published a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, which USA Today called, “a fierce memoir of personal transformation.”

In January 2024 she published the creativity book, 1000 Words:A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round which was praised on The Today Show, NPR, and elsewhere. In September 2024 she published a new novel, A Reason to See You Again.

She lives in New Orleans, LA.

Photo by Bryan Tarnowski