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Jennifer de Guzman was born during a drought-ending rainstorm in November 1977, but in life she is pleased with all sorts of weather. She has lived all her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently shares her space with her husband, artist Brian Belew, her son Mateo, and two cats, Mr. George and Oscar.
She graduated from San Jose State University’s creative writing program in 2008 with a Master of Fine Arts degree and was the recipient of the Marjorie McLaughlin Folendorf Award.
In her short stories, from her early work in Strange Horizons to the sequential art short stories (drawn by Brian Belew) in the Image anthologies Put The Book Back On The Shelf: A Belle And Sebastian Anthology and This Is A Souvenir: The Songs Of Spearmint & Shirley Lee, she strives infuse a sense of magic even when about they are about the mundane. In 2006, her story “Panchita’s Sea Lion” won an AWP Intro Journal Award and was published in The Colorado Review. The protagonist of this story went on to have a whole novel devoted to her, Half a Person, which is being shopped around to agents and publishers.
From January 2003 until January 2012, Jennifer was Editor-in-Chief at the comics and graphic novel publisher SLG Publishing. Currently, she is the PR & Marketing Director for Image Comics in Berkeley, California.
In 2006, she received the Friends of Lulu “Woman of Distinction” award for her work in the comics industry. She wrote her “Life in Comics” column for Publishers Weekly for three years and explored the influence of pop culture on her life in “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” a comic drawn by Brian Belew and published at Comic Book Resources’ Robot 6 blog. Currently, she writes graphic novel reviews and articles for Publishers Weekly’s Comics World.
She loves to look out windows and listen to The Smiths, has a deep, abiding fascination for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Cleopatra VII, shares a birthday with three of her favorite people — Voltaire, René Magritte, and Bjork — and wishes she could grow up to be like Gabriel García Márquez.
