Born and raised in the small town of Valley City, Ohio, Jen Hirt grew up as part of the fourth generation of family at Hirt's Greenhouse in Strongsville, Ohio. The events leading up to the demolition of the greenhouses are told in Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees, a memoir which won the Drake University Emerging Writer Prize. She is also the coeditor of two works of creative nonfiction -- Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press 2016) and Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction (MSU Press 2017). She edited Mediums: Fact or Fiction? for Greenhaven Press in 2006.Her essay "Lores of Last Unicorns" won a 2011 Pushcart Prize after being published in The Gettysburg Review. Other essays and poems have appeared in over 40 literary journals. Her work has won grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Ohioana Library, Bernheim Arboretum, and Penn State's Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. She is an alum of Hiram College, Iowa State University, and the University of Idaho. Jen is an assistant professor at Penn State Harrisburg. She lives in midtown Harrisburg with the writer Paul Cockeram and their chocolate Labrador retriever, Olly.