Jill Christman is a 2020 NEA Prose Fellow and the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays ​and two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure​ (winner of the AWP Prize for CNF) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood​. Her essays​ have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A senior editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative​ and executive producer of the podcast Indelible: Campus Sexual Violence​, she teaches creative nonfiction writing and literary editing at Ball State University​.



A graduate of the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Jill has worked as a cook at a kayak school on the Rogue River in southern Oregon, programmed pixelated birdies to flap in circles as a research assistant in a cognitive psychology lab in Eugene, traveled the Alabama backroads to count potted meats for the USDA, and somewhat more recently, served on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and taught creative nonfiction writing in Ashland University's low-residency MFA program. She was born during the summer of love in the now defunct Miami Baby Hospital while her older brother watched the largest crocodile in captivity—Cookie—swallow live chickens at the also obsolete Serpentarium.

She lives with her husband, poet Mark Neely, and their two cross-genre teenagers in Muncie, Indiana.