SMSU’s English program will have an exciting change this Spring 2024. Jessie Hennen, an academic and creative writing teacher who’s been at SMSU for two years, will be, [filling some big shoes]. The current director for the English Creative Writing department, Judy Wilson, [is handing over the reins] to Hennen.
A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop Hennen found herself working as a barista in Minneapolis, which made her pretty unhappy, she said.
“After I finished my fiction MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the program sent me on a fellowship to Wellington, New Zealand, to teach graduate-level writing for three months.”
“I had my own office, a literary agent for my first novel, and a herd of delightful and brilliant students; it seemed like things would simply keep going up.” When she came back to Minnesota, however, she had to get a job at a coffee shop.
“I remember gritting my teeth one day as I wiped down the espresso machine. My boss was snapping some questions at me about the chemical composition of coffee.”
Shortly after, she and her husband moved from Minneapolis to his family’s farm near Marshall, where she started as a fixed term professor in the Fall 2022. Then she was formally put on the tenure-track in Spring 2023.
“One of my favorite things about teaching is how it forces you to constantly learn, adapt, and optimize; I love improvising, especially when I’m solving problems. Becoming the program director means I’ll get to do even more of that,” she said.
Hennen has published book reviews and creative nonfiction, saying she is, “[P]articularly proud of one piece in the now defunct but beloved journal The Toast, written while sitting at a desk in an IKEA.”
She writes an arts column each week for the “Granite Falls Advocate Tribune”, and recently wrote one act of a play for the town’s Walking Theater. Originally from the St. Paul suburb of Shoreview, Minnesota, Hennen said she enjoys living on a farm in a rural area.
“I like that I can walk out my front door and basically be in a park – our house is surrounded by a lovely grove of trees.”
Already a beloved creative writing professor at SMSU, Hennen said she knew how well she liked teaching, and how successful with students she could be. When she returned to Minnesota after earning her MFA and teaching overseas, “I just couldn’t figure out how to get there again,” she said.
Now she has found her place at SMSU.
“Along with all the other things that excite me about becoming the new Director of Creative Writing, I am thrilled to have proven that mean coffee-shop boss wrong,” she said.
