Writer, Traveler, Food Lover
Jennifer Artley has lived and traveled extensively around the world, first as a US foreign service brat in South Korea, Nigeria, Israel, The Philippines, Myanmar, and China. This started early, when Artley and her parents lived among missionaries in the village of Kwangju during the Vietnam War where her father was stationed with the US Airforce.
Artley moved around a lot in her formative years, due to both her parents working for the State Department, causing her to witness a violent coup d’tat in Lagos, later seeing the hardships of life in Manila under Marcos’ military dictatorship, in Israel during the Lebanese War, and regularly visiting her father who was stationed in communist Czechoslovakia. In college, Artley interned at the American Embassy in Burma (Myanmar) and wrote biographical reports on the corrupt leaders of the government during the same summer they ordered military troops to fire on peaceful pro-democracy student-led demonstrations.
As an adult, Artley continued to travel and live abroad while raising her two children. She was a staff writer and Deputy Editor of the magazine beijingkids, and while living in Beijing, China with her young family, created an award-winning blog: Eat Planet Discover the World documenting their attempt to eat every cuisine in the world. Artley’s first book, Hard Sleeper, that she co-authored with her mother, Jean Artley Szymanski, shortly before her death, is a murder mystery that takes place in 1930s Peking and Shanghai. Hard Sleeper was a finalist of the 2003 Readers Preference Editor’s Choice Award for Historical Fiction.
Artley was twice invited to the heralded Aspen Summer Words memoir and fiction workshops and studied under Andre Dubus III. She has since lived in the NYC area, Italy and Spain, and now lives in Virginia. She is currently writing her third book, a memoir about her life through food.
