About

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

What Are Possible Impossiblities?

“The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided they have Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with all their Possibility.”
- Henry Fielding, quoting Aristotle in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Biography

jennifer pic

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, and two cats, Mr. George and Oscar. She graduated from San Jose State University’s creative writing program in 2007 with a Master of Fine Arts degree and was the recipient of the Marjorie McLaughlin Folendorf Award.

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, strive to be magical even when 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, Sliver of Light.

Jennifer continues to write stories that explore people living in stifling conditions — either literally or metaphorically (often both) — for a series she calls “Interior Scenes.” She’s also working on her next novel, tentatively title Visions.

Jennifer also is the editor-in-chief at the comics and graphic novel publisher SLG Publishing. In 2006, she received the Friends of Lulu “Woman of Distinction” award for her work in the comics industry. She writes for Publishers Weekly Comics Week in her “Life in Comics” column and explores 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.

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.