About Brendan

Born in Denver, Brendan Jones was raised in Philadelphia and attended Columbia and Oxford before spending eleven years as a general contractor, founding Greensaw Design & Build and guiding Pennsylvania's first LEED Platinum reconstruction. He has lived in Alaska for the better part of 25 years, where he carpenters and commercial fishes, and teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska, Stanford (where he was a 2013–15 Wallace Stegner Fellow), and Irkutsk Technical University in Russia.

He has been a MacDowell Fellow and a resident at the Anderson Center, Caldera, and Ragdale, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, GQ, Smithsonian, Alpinist, Patagonia, Ploughshares, FineWoodworking, National Fisherman, Narratively, and elsewhere, along with commentary for NPR.

His novel The Alaskan Laundry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) won the 2017 Alaskana Prize, and Whispering Alaska (Penguin Random House) won the 2023 Green Earth Book Award. He spent a year in Siberia with his family as a Fulbright Scholar. He lives in Sitka with his wife, three daughters, six chickens, and an Aussie shepherd.

Brendan is a recipient of the Alaskana Award, Green Earth Book Award, Stegner Fellowship, Fulbright, MacDowell.

Rights & media: Julia Masnik, Watkins/Loomis Agency