Jill Christman
Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (Nebraska, 2022), Darkroom: A Family Exposure, and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Ball State University, where she serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things.
Featured Book
The Heart Folds Early
River Teeth editor and serial memoirist Jill Christman is known for “revolutionizing” the lyric essay (Brevity), but when she set out to write about the choice to end a half-term pregnancy due to the revelation her baby had just half a heart, she put the manuscript away. Post Roe, she decided to take the advice she’s given students for years: to write into their dark rooms. The Heart Folds Early is her loving, raging, and often funny antitoxin to our collective moment—her responsibility to the brave girl and reckless young widow she once was, the woman and wife she is, and the mother of belly laughs she continues to be.
Meet Jill Christman and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.