Jane LCarman

Jane L. Carman is an experimental fiction writer, editor, and reading-series founder rooted in west-central Illinois, near Galesburg in Knox County. She grew up between Galesburg and Yates City, hand-fishing the Spoon River with her father, and that landscape runs through much of her work. After a BS and MA at Central Michigan University and an MFA in fiction at the University of Notre Dame, she returned to Illinois for a second master's and a PhD in English at Illinois State University, where she was a Sutherland Fellow and defended in 2012 with the dissertation Rest(Less) Lit in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy: Movement Through Words. She prefers writing that, in her own words, takes in genreless breaths and lives by rules that continuously morph into the unfamiliar.

Beyond JEF, Carman founded Lit Fest Press and its Festival of Language umbrella, the reading series a reading eXperiment, the now-archived journal Festival Writer, and the David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State. She is co-author of Scattershot: Collected Fictions (Lit Fest Press, 2015, with Amy L. Eggert and Jessica Smith) and edited the conference anthologies Normal 2015 and Normal 2016 for that press. Her short work has appeared in American Book Review, Devil's Lake, Santa Clara Review, and the Dirty : Dirty anthology (Jaded Ibis Productions, 2013).

Her novel Tangled in Motion (JEF Books, 2015) is a hybrid of running text, prose-poetry, and lyric memoir about love, abandonment, and the restorying of a girl living in the margins of a marginalized society. Her relationship to the press runs deeper than a single title: she served as judge of the 2019 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, selecting Genelle Chaconas's Plague City and writing the encomium that praised it for showing how literature might move forward in a chaotic world.

She has also won the Paul Somers Prize for Creative Prose (2016) and multiple regional Iron Pen Awards. Start with Tangled in Motion, the one JEF book that carries her own voice.