J. Annie MacLeod

Jennifer Cognard-Black, Professor of English and Director of Student Fellowships and Awards, teaches literature and creative writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college fastened to a shore in Southern Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia and a Senior Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, she received the 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, considered the Nobel Prize for teachers. Jennifer is the author or co-editor of six books, including Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP, 2014) and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (NYUP, 2024), and she has also produced two lecture series with The Great Courses, including one on “Great American Short Stories,” as well as an Audible Original, “Books that Cook: Food & Fiction.” Jennifer publishes her short fiction under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, such as Story, So to Speak, Versal, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Jennifer has also won awards to support her fiction, including a creative fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Gold Prize for Anthologies from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for her co-edited anthology of creative nonfiction essays, From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines (MSUP, 2016). Jennifer’s current projects are producing a second Audible Original on the dystopian vision of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale as well as writing her first novel, under the working title “Becoming Karen.”