About me

Jennifer Baker is an author and publishing professional with more than twenty years of experience in books. She's the author of the young adult novel Forgive Me Not (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2023) — a 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist that was also named an NYPL Best Book for Teens, a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Best of the Best (grades 9–12), and included on Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2023, the Texas Library Association's 2024 TAYSHAS Reading List, and Capitol Choices' 2024 Noteworthy Books for Teens. She's also the editor of the short-story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Jennifer is the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, which she launched in 2014, and has served on the faculty of The City College of New York's Publishing Certificate Program and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. A former contributing editor at Electric Literature, she received a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship and a Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant in Nonfiction Literature, and her essay "What We Aren't (or the Ongoing Divide)" was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. In 2019 she was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Superstar for her contributions to inclusion and representation in publishing, and in 2024 she received the Axinn Writing Award from Adelphi University's inaugural Alice Hoffman Writers & Readers Festival.

She has volunteered with organizations such as We Need Diverse Books and I, Too Arts Collective, and speaks widely on inclusion, the craft of writing and editing, podcasting, and the inner workings of the publishing industry. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have appeared in a range of print and online publications.