About Jessica

Welcome to my website and my about page, which is full of all my facts and touts my publications as these bits do. But mostly, I'm a reader and a writer, a mother and a poet, a paddler, gardener, and constant dog walker. I appreciate your visit here, and I hope you'll poke around and find something you would like to read.

Jessica Barksdale Inclán's novels include the award-winning The Burning Hour as well as contemporary fiction Her Daughter's Eyes, The Matter of Grace, and When You Believe. Finishing Line Press published her debut poetry collection When We Almost Drowned in 2019. Her second poetry collection, Grim Honey, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions April 2021.

In February 2023, her sixteenth novel, What the Moon Did, was published by Flexible Press. And after many years of writing and publishing short stories, her first collection Trick of the Porch Light was published by Mouthfeel Press in September 2023. Her third poetry collection, Let's End This Now, won the Barbara Stevens manuscript competition, judged by Edward Hirsch, and was published in 2024.

Her first mystery, currently titled What They Found at the Lake, will be published in 2027.

A multiple Pushcart Prize, Million Writers Award, and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Sun, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Salt Hill Journal, Arts & Letters, Carve Magazine, StoryQuarterly, and Tar River Poetry among many others.

At Diablo Valley College, Barksdale Inclán taught composition, creative writing, and literature and was chair of the creative writing committee and coordinated literature week and began the yearly student writing contest.

She continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She holds an MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica now lives in Vancouver, Washington.