Jess Barron

Jess Barron writes fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her debut novel, How to Un-Murder Your Life, is a speculative thriller about a canceled celebrity chef. Her essay ‘The Money Tree,’ about a relationship forged with a digital assistant during the 2020 lockdown, appears in (HER)OICS: Women’s Lived Experience During the Coronavirus Pandemic (Pact Press/Regal House), which BuzzFeed named one of 18 new small-press books you won’t want to put down. Her bylines include Wired, Fortune, and Entrepreneur.

From Santa Monica to Silicon Valley, she has led digital content and editorial teams at Yahoo!, LIVESTRONG, Headspace, and SimplePractice. From the ages of thirteen to twenty-three, she worked in the low-tech kitchen of her family’s half-century-old Italian restaurant in Massachusetts, where she shucked roughly 24,000 oysters, was twice locked in the walk-in cooler, and learned never to touch her face after chopping pepperoncini. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their English Lab, Star.