Heather Jacobs

Heather Jacobs is an editor and fiction writer currently working on a novel that takes place in northern California. Her work appeared most recently in The Lumberyard and Fugue, and she is the founding editor of Big Fiction Magazine, a biannual literary journal that gained national attention in Poets & Writers, and online at NewPages.com and Ploughshares.

Heather received 2014 GAP funding for travel costs to create a publishable excerpt from a novel and build a platform from when it is completed. Spanning about a century, up to the present day, her novel-in-progress follows one northern California family over several generations, going back to Italian, Spanish, and British immigrants. It is a collage of voices, each chapter focusing on a different family member. Some chapters will feature more “peripheral” characters that have touched the central protagonists’ lives at a turning point. Through the course of her research for one such chapter she came across a fascinating individual: George Pierce, Jr., an almond grower, Booster, and community organizer in California, around the turn of the century. He was so interesting she created a fictional character based on him and, with GAP funds, will travel to California to do further research.