Jessica Elisheva Emerson (she, her)

Jessica Elisheva Emerson is a native Tucsonan who spent 22 years in Los Angeles before returning to the Sonoran desert where she lives with her husband and children. She comes to the festival with "Olive Days," her debut novel. Her poems and stories have been published in a number of journals, and she is also a produced playwright. Ask her about pie, her challah-braiding technique, or the recipe for a perfect Old Fashioned.       

Visit website |

Awards: 2025 GLCA New Writers Award, 2025 LA Times Festival of Books Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist (winner announced April), 2025 Writing the West Book Awards longlist (winner announced May), ​2025 Sophie Brody Medal Award RUSA / American Library Association Notable Book

Communities: Arizona Author, Tucsonan

Book:

Olive Days

A Novel
Fiction / Literature
Catapult
September 2024
ISBN 9781640096530
320 pages

Olive Days is a completely immersive novel, unlike anything I've read. We're in so deep with Rina, as she navigates the complicated restraints of her Orthodox Jewish community, that every meal, every walk, every discovery of her possible choices feels immediate. Emerson's prose is not about religion or desire, those abstract ideas, but about a woman's burning disbelief in the very structure of her life, and her absolute insistence on sexual passion and freedom." More/less