Jacqueline Kolosov grew up in and around Chicago and has loved and lived with a variety of animals all her life. She holds degrees from the University of Chicago (English Literature, BA & MA) and New York University (English Literature, PhD). She is Professor of English at Texas Tech University where she serves on the Creative Writing Faculty. Among her most notable awards are an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose and a $46,500 community engagement grant from The Foundation to ground direct to arts programming for at-risk populations in the Lubbock area (2018). The latter speaks to her ongoing interest in Art in Community Health and Narrative Medicine.
Her abiding preoccupation with the relationship between memory, identity & imagination stems from her family background, as both of her parents and their families immigrated to Chicago from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Her paternal grandmother, pictured here as a child in school uniform in St. Petersburg, proved to be a formidable storyteller and keeper of ancestral history.