Jen Michalski’s debut novel, The Tide King, was winner of the 2012 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press. In 2013, it was voted “Best Book” by The City Paper and also earned Michalski the title “Best Writer” in Baltimore Magazine’s “Best of Baltimore” issue. In 2016, The Tide King was a First Place Winner in the Somerset Awards.

REVIEWS

"It's likely that this book will finally make Michalski known to the wider world-in a big way. Seriously, if I weren't entirely averse to all attempts to predict the future, I would say this book will be huge. But there's no accounting for people's tastes, so I will say instead, with some certainty, that it will be important." - Baynard Woods, The Baltimore City Paper

"Though admirably multidimensional, Michalski never fails to tell compelling stories capable of challenging and surprising readers. That readership figures to grow substantially if she continues producing work of this caliber." - Baltimore Magazine

"Jen Michalski's long-awaited novel, winner of the Big Moose Prize, promises to be an important book in the American lexicon." -  The Baltimore Sun

"The Tide King is a complex book that examines both the evils that people can do to one another, as well as the beauty that is possible." -  Fjords Review

ABOUT THE TIDE KING:

Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley to get answers.

Michalski's The Tide King is the story of burnette saxifrage, an herb rumored in Polish folklore to provide those who eat it with immortality, and its effects on three generations of a Polish family over two continents beginning in 19th-century Poland and ending in 1976 America.

But it is also the story of young men’s sacrifice during great wars, of a young child's experiences during the holocaust and being a war orphan, of the curiosities of the American century, such as 1950s country music and smoke jumpers in the Montana mountains and 1970s New York. Just as Viking king Cnut, who was rumored to be so powerful that he controlled the tides at his feet, discovered “how empty and worthless is the power of kings,” Calvin Johnson and others cursed by the herb find in The Tide King that the power of youth and immortality is an empty gift, for they will continually witness the death of their families, lovers, dreams, and ideals.

"The Art of Promotion," Interview in 2014 Writers Market

Michalski's second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, was published by Queens Ferry Press in August 2016 and then acquired by Black Lawrence Press in December 2017.  Baltimore Magazine said of Summer, "Through Michalski's unusual and but effective structure and her insightful and deeply personal writing, we begin to understand just how much strength it takes for a personal to peel back the layers of a troubled past."  Baltimore Magazine also picked Summer as one of its favorite books of 2016.

The twelve stories in From Here (a 2015 USA Book Awards finalist, Short Fiction) explore the dislocations and intersections of people searching, running away, staying put. Their physical and emotional landscapes run the gamut, but in the end, they’re all searching for a place to call home.

The stories in From Here will take you by force, like “little bombs exploding in your back and stomach.” Their “dense, packed progressions” will devastate you, will absolutely “jackpot your heart,” and you will want to “stay really, really quiet” and “very, very still” until you feel stronger, or at least strong enough to “withstand a hurricane.” I am in love with these stories, the “pink-dark dusk” of the “living, breathing questions” they ask of us, and I am utterly and jaw-droppingly in awe of Jen Michalski’s tender and ruthless “love for the difficult.”
—Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart

Jen Michalski’s characters seem to breathe through the pages of this emotionally expansive collection. Each story is a world in which the reader will linger—not to seek refuge but to gain insight, and perhaps, find a kindred soul.
—Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects, In the Year of Long Division, and others

From Here slices at the myths of All-Americana and delivers instead heartfelt stories that mirror America’s contemporary epidemic of neglect—neglect of others and of the self. The desires of the main characters in From Here are invariably in conflict with the desires of their loved ones, and of their souls. This is a collection of brokenness that cuts, of characters desperately trying to clean up the mess. Unlike so many of these struggling but striving characters, however, Jen Michalski, the writer and the heart, knows what truly needs attention.
—Ethel Rohan, author of Goodnight Nobody

Oh to be Jen Michalski and conjure characters so real that your stories never truly end, each a novel-in-waiting. Readers must check their sentimentality at the door. Here there be monsters: fires, miscarriages, attempted suicides, abortions, dead rabbits, cancer, and a trip to Disney World. Reminiscent of Armistead Maupin’s work, From Here is a sometimes stark, totally honest, vivid collection of twelve stories featuring wounded, curious, lost, and hungry people, none of whom are poised to take over the world. Still, Michalski’s compassion, geographic palette (Baltimore, New Mexico, Southern Delaware, NYC), and exquisite details, makes me hope that somehow they all will.
—Richard Peabody, ed. Gargoyle Magazine

This is short fiction at its moody, character-driven best. The people you meet are so vivid and so sympathetic that their joys and sorrows will quickly become your own. I haven’t decided which is my favorite story, but I know my favorite line: “Good luck with your broken things.” Fantastic.
—Matthew Norman, author of Domestic Violets

From Dzanc Books (published January 2013)

This collection of two novellas showcases Jen Michalski’s skills as a writer. In “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner,” Michalski examines the dangers of living in a world while having a compromised reality. In a first-person narrative, the reader follows Jimmy, a mentally challenged fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally kills a neighborhood girl. He winds up running away and hitching a ride with a trucker who is not as trustworthy a companion as Jimmy believes him to be.

In “May-September,” which won first place in Press 53’s Open Awards in 2010, a young writer is hired by a much-older woman over the summer to help blog her memoirs for her grandchildren. An unlikely friendship, and more, follows, as Michalski examines one of the last cultural taboos of our age: May-December romances.

"In tandem, [the novellas] inform one another, their threads entangling, ultimately affording a more complete reading of the collection as a whole." – Nik Korpin, Electric Literature

"The two very different styles in Could You Be With Her Now, not only make the case for the novellas as form, but also for Michalski as a wise writer and master stylist." – Baynard Woods, Baltimore City Paper

"Jen is an astonishingly sensitive writer." – Adam Robinson, HTML Giant

"Stewart O'Nan has written understandingly and movingly about the life of an older woman in Emily, Alone: A Novel. 'May-September' adds to the admittedly limited oeuvre with the inspiring story of a woman who can still come alive through love." – Celeste Sollod, Style Magazine

"At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition."– Sara Lippmann, [Pank]

"This is an admirable and original book. Michalski is a skilled storywriter." – Roman Gladstone, Chamber Four

"Michalski is just a damned good writer, and her subject matter is, at the same time, the most common story there is: love. She handles it beautifully, revealing herself as one of the finest writers working today." – Cort Bledsoe, Ampersand Review

"Could You Be With Her Now, a book of two novellsa, is one of the most writerly books I've come across in awhile. What I mean is, Michalski gave a lot of thought to how she wanted to write these stories and then executed them so beautifully that the result is a piece of art to be admired as it is absorbed." – Lindsey Silken, Hello Giggles

"In both stories, Michalski explores what it means to be vulnerable in modern society, what it means to be invisible, powerless, voiceless—either from mental or physical fraility—but struggling to matter in the world just the same. How carelessness and resentments on part of the family members can inadvertently thrust their vulnerable loved ones into situations that bring unexpected, unwanted, painful consequences." – Rosalia Scalia, The Little Patuxent Review

'While “Dinner” feels like a celebration of its form’s nervous charms, “May-September” expands on its “state of grace” strengths, lending Now a certain comprehensive sweep; taken as a whole, the book feels like a tour de force statement on how — and why — novellas continue to be written." – Joseph Martin, Baltimore Fishbowl

"Together, these works illustrate how so often, we fail to go any deeper than the surface of those around us. Both in Jimmy and Sandra's interactions with the world around them, there is a breakdown of communication, and a failing of those who are close." – Jennifer Ray Morell, Sundog Lit

"Kudos to Michalski for giving me ALL THE EMOTIONS. Whether you fall into these two stories willingly, or struggle to catalog and exercise all of the demons you are dealing with as you make your way through, one thing is certain. Michalski will make you feel. And feeling... well, feeling anything feels good." – Lori Hettler, The Next Best Book Thing

Winner, Best Anthology, Best of Baltimore 2010

"There is a saying in Baltimore," said the sage himself, H.L. Mencken, "that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good." The same can be said of the different short pieces of prose collected in City Sages: Baltimore. Here are thirty-six ways to create literary art in Baltimore, and all of them are good. Edited by Jen Michalski, this first-ever anthology of some of Baltimore's best writers includes both famous and not-yet-famous scribes, both dead and alive. Michalski's objective was to represent an array of writers over a period of time who were born in Baltimore or lived in the city. The anthology includes pieces by seminal writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neal Hurston, Frederick Douglass, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; contemporary writers such as Laura Lippman, Anne Tyler, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Kimball, Alice McDermott, Jessica Anya Blau, and Rafael Alvarez; and emerging writers such as Rosalia Scalia, Caryn Coyle, Joe Young, and Adam Robinson.

Jen Michalski co-hosted the 510 Readings (voted "Best Scene" by the Baltimore City Paper), a monthly fiction reading series, with Michael Kimball from 2007 to 2014 and The Lit Show with Betsy Boyd, a literary biannual variety show, in 2012. Since 2014, she has hosted Starts Here!, a monthly fiction and nonfiction reading series sponsored by the Ivy Bookshop, at Bird in Hand. She's hosted readers from United States, Toronto, and London, including Tania James, Pamela Erens, Carolyn Parkhurst, Laura van den Berg, Elissa Schapell, Ron Kesey, Jason Diamond, and Josh Weil. In 2017, Baltimore Magazine awarded Starts Here! Reading series a "Best of Baltimore" for best reading series.

jmww  (https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/) was founded by Jen Michalski and Catherine Harrison in 2004, first as a quarterly online, and now as a weekly web magazine featuring fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and book reviews, with new content every few days. For five years, jmww also published a print annual and currently holds an annual poetry chapbook competition, The Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award. Writers have been nominated for Pushcart and Million Writers Award prizes. 

In the fall of 2013, I collaborated with painter Minas Konsolas, writing text for a series of 22 paintings he entitled "Dream City." Below are both Minas' artist statement and mine. The collaboration can be viewed at:

http://www.minasgalleryandboutique.com/dream_city.html

"The mountain village where I was born, as well as the mountain village works of Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, and Derain, helped me shape this series.

Due to connectivity and the loss of privacy in the electronic age, the city setting no longer offers anonymity.

The mountain village comes full circle in my paintings, where each one of them becomes a unique entity of intimacy and community. The Dream City Village, if you will."--Minas Konsolas

"Minas speaks of being influenced by painters Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, and Derain. When I view his work, I am reminded of the Romantic poets Keats, Whitman, Wordsworth, and Shelley, who I have referenced liberally. We are interconnected and trapped by ourselves, closer than ever and simultaneously farther apart. Nature seeps into Minas’ work like an insanity, breaking through cracks and weaving through windows, breaking down all that we have built, like it always does, beckoning us back to its paradise of the mind and soul."--Jen Michalski