Jill Swenson is a developmental editor and literary representative in Wisconsin who earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from The University of Chicago and taught journalism at the University of Georgia-Athens and Ithaca College. She has taught writing workshops at The Loft Literary Center, Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, and the Grand Marais Art Colony. In July 2021 she completed a writing residency sponsored by the St. Croix Watershed Research Station (Science Museum of Minnesota) and was the featured writer-in-residence for the Red Shoes Lake of the Woods Writing Retreat in September 2021. She has recently completed a braided nonfiction narrative manuscript, Dispossessed, exploring on Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota the connections between her maternal relations and the Kakaygeesick family over seven generations and why we can never dispossess ourselves of the past, no matter how shameful or tragic or distant.