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.
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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.
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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.