Contact Jessie if you would like to set up a reading or a speaking engagement, or if you would like further details about upcoming events.

Jessie’s new essay collection Yoke & Feather released with Dzanc Books in November 2024 and was named one of the Best Southern Books of November by Southern Review of Books and was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year in the essay category. And Call It Horses released in paperback in October 2024. You can find event info below and read sample essays from Y&F here: “Once, Little Lion” in The Adroit Journal blog and “Gospel of the Many Selves” in Lit Hub.

Jessie’s essay “Washtub, Whelk, Widow, Woods” was named the 2024 winner of the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize. About the essay, contest judge Sarah Viren said: “I am tempted to call ‘Washtub, Whelk, Widow, Woods’ a meeting of Velimir Khlebnikov and Marilynne Robinson, of Saint Augustine and Rebecca Solnit, but this essay is all its own. I read and reread it in a state of awe, amid feelings of both delirium and discovery, and with first a sense and then a growing conviction that I had stumbled upon something utterly beautiful and totally new.” The essay appeared in issue 27.1 (Spring 2025) of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

In Electric Literature, Jessie celebratedsthe launch of Call It Horses with a discussion of seven books that grapple with spirituality & the body.

Jessie’s novel, Call It Horses, released March 23, 2021, won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction and was named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES award in general adult fiction: “Call It Horses is a spectacular novel. With the gorgeous language of Jayne Anne Phillips, the compassion of Carson McCullers, Jessie van Eerden follows an unforgettable cast of women through their lives and longing in West Virginia with precision and insight. An original, beautifully structured, and deeply moving book.” –Karen E. Bender, author of The New Order and Refund, finalist for the National Book Award

Jessie’s essay “Bless the Smallest Hollow: On Longing and Online Dating,” winner of the 2018 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2020.

“What I Want Your Voice to Do,” an essay by Jessie in Blackbird, was selected by Sundress Publications for Best of the Net 2018.

“Yoke,” an essay by Jessie in Appalachian Review (Fall 2017), won the 2017 Denny C. Plattner Award for Nonfiction.