About

Jesse Ruddock is a writer, musician and photographer. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Now Keep Me Warm (Coach House, 2027) and the novel Shot-Blue (Coach House, 2017). Her writing and photographs have appeared in the NewYorker.com, BOMB, N+1, Music & Literature, Vice, etc.

Jesse is a founding editor of the anti-disciplinary magazine O BOD based in Tiohtia:ke/Montreal and a teacher of Creative Writing at York University in Toronto.

After playing AAA boys’ hockey growing up and playing for the historic women’s club the Aeros in Toronto as a teenager, Jesse received hockey scholarships across the US and went to Harvard. At Harvard, she played starting goal in two Frozen Fours in three years, while establishing the highest save percentage in the NCAA, a record held for a decade, before a string of concussions ended her career. In her final year at Harvard, out of the game and completing a degree in American and English Literature, she joined creative writing seminars, inspiring a return home to pursue a Master’s in English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. After drafting her first novel, touring albums with various bands, and ten years working in publishing in New York City (Seven Stories, New Directions, Verso), Jesse joined the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University to complete a PhD in English. Her dissertation titled “Blood Work: Radical Anatomies of Circulation” is a Marxist critique of the circulation of capital through the lens of embodied refusal.

Jesse lives with her partner Georgia Phillips-Amos and their children in the city of Guelph on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Attawandaron, and Haudenosaunee peoples, on the present-day lands and along the rivers and lakes of the Michi Saagiig Anishnaabeg.