Jane Marchant

Jane Marchant is a writer, photographer, and collage artist from Berkeley, California. She is the PEN America Literary Awards Program Director and earned her BA and MFA from Columbia University’s nonfiction writing programs, where she served as co-president of Our Word, a student group advocating for diversity and inclusion in the graduate writing program. She’s taught creative writing in Columbia’s Program for High School Students, as well as to young people incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island.

Her work has appeared in Guernica, Apogee, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere, as well as anthologized in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2Leaf Press, 2017). She is at work on a memoir in the form of an Encyclopedia of Botany of the San Francisco Bay Area, which considers themes of motherhood, racial passing, and interconnected root systems. She lives between the Bay Area and New York City, and has also lived in Munich, Amsterdam, and southern Turkey, and traveled extensively—including swimming in the Nile, driving across the Australian Outback, and exploring Lebanon’s Jeita Grotto.

Support Jane on Venmo @Jane-Rebecca-Marchant

“An Extraordinarily Condensed Excerpt from JANE MARCHANT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BOTANY” featured in Plant People, An Anthology of Environmental Artists.