Jenkins, Emily 1967-

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JENKINS, Emily 1967-

PERSONAL: Born 1967, in New York, NY; daughter of Len Jenkin (a playwright); married; children: one daughter. Education: Attended Vassar College; Columbia University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Penguin Putnam, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Novelist.

AWARDS, HONORS: Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book, 2002, for Five Creatures.

WRITINGS:

(With Len Jenkins) The Secret Life of Billy's Uncle Myron, Holt (New York, NY), 1996.

Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture, Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

Five Creatures, illustrated by Tomek Bogacki, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

Mister Posterior and the Genius Child, Penguin Putnam (New York, NY), 2002.

Daffodil, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2004.

My Favorite Thing, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2004.

That New Animal, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer Emily Jenkins was born in New York City and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Seattle, Washington. She studied English at Vassar, then went to Columbia University to earn a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century English literature. Her father, Len Jenkin, is a playwright.

Jenkins told an Amazon.com interviewer that her mother was "a real hippie," and that when they lived in Cambridge, they lived in a communal home, ate brown rice, and meditated. When the family moved to Seattle, she went to a more "preppy" school, with crew races and winter formals. Jenkins said that these contrasting cultures had a great influence on her writing and her sense of the world.

As a child, she wrote voluminously from the age of seven until she was thirteen, when she became interested in boys. "Then I thought only about boys for many years," she said, until she began writing her first book, The Secret Life of Billie's Uncle Myron. Written with her father, the book describes the adventures of a brother and sister who travel to a fantastic world where motels fly, crows talk, and other bizarre things happen. They reach this place, the Borderland, after hiding in the back of their Uncle Myron's car and being inadvertently taken there. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that the book has "plenty of fizz and pizzazz."

Jenkins' father, and his work, had a great influence on Jenkins. Sitting in the back of darkened theaters, watching rehearsals and seeing how the meaning of a scene changed as the actors changed their inflections or movements, fascinated her.

Her next book, Tongue First; Adventures in Physical Culture, follows Jenkins as she hurls herself into various body experiments: tattooing, heroin addiction, sensory deprivation, shaved heads, aerobics classes, and body piercing among other things. Jenkins tried all of these and then wrote about her experiences in a series of essays. In the London Observer, Nicci Gerrard described the book as "unashamedly narcissistic and a curious mixture of the brave and the coy," and commented that Jenkins's narrative voice is "slangy and intimate" In the Richmond Review, Amanda Jeremin Harris wrote that although Jenkins's writing can be powerful, at times she descends into an adolescent tone that limits her ability to connect with the reader. However, Harris also noted that "when Jenkins decides to own all of her experiences, she will become a real force to reckon with."

With Five Creatures, Jenkins returned to the world of children's books. The book describes the three people and two cats that live in the narrator's house, and categorizes them according to various characteristics: for example, there are "three short and two tall. Four grownups and one child (that's me!). Two with long hair, three with short." Some categories separate the cats and humans, and others unite them: only cats eat mice, but three humans and one cat can open cupboards. The book was named a Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book for 2002.

In 2002 Jenkins published Mister Posterior and the Genius Child, about a young girl growing up in the 1970s who is chosen as the best speller in her school. Jenkins has also written three ten-minute plays, which were produced in Soho Repertory Theater's summer festivals.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Booklist, March 15, 2001, Ilene Cooper, review of Five Creatures, p. 1401.

Commonweal, June 18, 1999, Gabrielle Steinfels, review of Tongue First, p. 24.

Entertainment Weekly, September 18, 1998, Clarissa Cruz, review of Tongue First, p. 82.

Horn Book, March, 2001, review of Five Creatures, p. 197; January-February, 2002, Leonard S. Marcus, review of Five Creatures, p. 24.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2002, review of Mister Posterior and the Genius Child, p. 1337.

Observer (London, England), January 10, 1999, Nicci Gerrard, review of Tongue First, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, October 14, 1996, review of The Secret Life of Billie's Uncle Myron, p. 84; June 15, 1998, review of Adventures in Physical Culture, p. 48; March 26, 2001, review of Five Creatures, p. 91; November 4, 2002, review of Mister Posterior and the Genius Child, p. 60.

School Library Journal, November, 1996, John Sigwald, review of The Secret Life of Billie's Uncle Myron, p. 107; May, 2001, Sheryl Shipley, review of Five Creatures, p. 124.

Teaching Children Mathematics, April, 2002, review of Five Creatures, p. 488.