Jonna Higgins-Freese

Jonna’s essays, poetry, and short stories have appeared in local and national publications including Grist Magazine, The Attached Parent, EarthLight, The Wapsipinicon Almanac, The Examined Life, and Obsolete!. Her essay “Race, Sacrifice, and Native Lands” was anthologized in This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, 2nd edition, and “Tarzan of the Apes: An Ecofeminist Perspective” was included in Investigating the Unliterary: Six Readings of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. She won The Examined Life’s 2013 poetry contest by accident, when she tried to diversify her portfolio of rejections while seeking an agent for a memoir.

After majoring in English and French as a Presidential Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, Jonna completed a Masters of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School and served two terms in AmeriCorps.

She has waited tables, detasseled corn, driven the leak-seeking Sniffy Truck for the gas company, run a statewide nonprofit dedicated to responsible land use, worked as a college registrar, and led the team that provided all central academic technology at a Big Ten university during the pandemic. A stint at an educational testing company led to the next essay on her to-write list, “How I Killed Compass and Why it Had it Coming.”

Jonna lives with her family in Iowa City, where everyone writes. Her second book, Harriet Smith in Charge: A Novel of Cahokia, is forthcoming from Bell House Press.