About Jillian

Jillian Barnet is a Best American essayist and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Her writing explores family, the fallout of closed adoption, and transplantation to a rural farming community. Jillian is a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays, New York Times, HuffPost, New Letters, Under the Sun, Brevity, Journal of the American Medical Association, Image, and Literary Mama, among others.

Relinquished at birth during the “Baby Scoop” era, Jillian has made excavating the secrets of her adoption a driving force of her life and the subject of her memoir, for which she is currently seeking representation.

When she’s not writing or hiking, you can find Jillian in the garden of her 200-year-old farmhouse in the Finger Lakes, surrounded by a growing array of opinionated animals.