Hi, I’m Jenn.

The first thing you’ll discover about me is that I’m passionate about a lot of things: skiing, sailing, writing, adventuring, photographing, my heritage, and my cat. My love of travel, new cultures, and foreign languages has taken me around the world since I was 13 years old. I’ve lived in Paris and Rennes, worked on volunteer projects in Berlin and Belgium, run with the bulls in Pamplona, taught Norwegian in Norway, raced a sailboat from L.A. to Honolulu, and skied my way across the Alps and the Rocky Mountains.

My grandparents escaped their homeland of Lithuania on the eve of the second Soviet occupation in 1944. They traveled across wartime Germany, and spent five years post-war in Germany, amassing enough stories to more than fill a novel. My aunt and father were born in a displaced persons camp in Tübingen before the family immigrated to the United States on a liberty ship in 1950. After Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union 40 years later, I sought to get my citizenship. I traveled for the first time to Lithuania in 1997 to learn Lithuanian at Vilnius University and get my first Lithuanian passport.

I moved to Vilnius on a one-way ticket in December 2003. My goal was to improve my Lithuanian enough to speak it with my grandmother. I thought I would stay in Lithuania for six months, maybe a year. I stayed for five and a half. I found a job at Cosmopolitan and FHM magazines as the photo editor and later began writing the column “Letter from Lithuania” for Lithuanian Heritage about life in Lithuania from a Lithuanian-American perspective.

While in Lithuania, I started the first ever ski club for kids, which produced two Olympians: Ieva Januškevičiutė and Rokas Zaveckas who participated at the 2014 Sochi Games. (I cheered Rokas and Ieva on in Sochi, and cheered for Ieva in Pyeongchang.) In June 2009, I left Lithuania to work as a ski coach on Mt. Ruapehu in Ohakune, New Zealand. The recession took me back to Aspen, Colorado, where I landed a job as the art director at Aspen Magazine and continued ski coaching & instructing on the weekends.

In 2011, I decided to commit fully to my writing and moved to San Francisco, my current base, to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) in Writing at California College of the Arts. My focus was on fiction and creative non-fiction, and I nearly completed two novels in two years. I am currently seeking representation for There Is Only One Way Home, a historical fiction novel is based on my grandmother’s story. 

Since fiction doesn’t pay until you’re published (and often not even then) I found my way into content marketing. I can help you develop a modern marketing strategy for your brand that will work. I’m skilled in B2B and B2C communications, copywriting, ghostwriting, editing, and strategy. Whoever I’m writing for, what I really love is painting portraits and telling stories—no matter if the tool I use is a paintbrush, a camera, or a handful of words.