Those Who Save Us (Blum)

Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—in Montclair, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., Boston University
• Awards—Harold Ribalow Prize by Hadassah Magazine
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts

Jenna Blum is of German and Jewish descent. She worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and runs fiction workshops for Grub Street Writers. (From the publisher.)

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New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum has been writing professionally since 1986, when her short story "The Legacy of Frank Finklestein" won First Prize in Seventeen magazine's national fiction contest. Jenna's debut novel Those Who Save Us was published by Harcourt in 2004. In October 2007 the novel, called "the little book that could" in Publishers Weekly, jumped onto the Boston Globe and the New York Times bestseller lists. 

Those Who Save Us won the Harold Ribalow Prize, awarded by Hadassah magazine and adjudged by Elie Wiesel, in 2005; foreign rights have been sold in Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Italy, Israel, Norway, and Spain.  Those Who Save Us was also the Borders Book Club Selection for Summer 2007.  A World War II mother-daughter story inspired by Jenna’s German and Jewish heritage and the interviews she conducted for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Those Who Save Us is a national book club favorite and continues to hold steady on the New York Times bestseller list.

Jenna, who always wanted to be a writer, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, the eldest daughter of a broadcast journalist and a concert pianist. She was educated at Kenyon College (B.A., English) and Boston University (M.A., Creative Writing) and published short fiction and nonfiction in numerous literary magazines and newspapers, including Seventeen, the Boston Globe, Improper Bostonian, Poets & Writers, Meridian, Faultline, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Bellingham Review, and Briar Cliff Review, which twice nominated Jenna's stories for a Pushcart Prize.

Jenna taught Creative and Communications Writing for six years at Boston University, where she was also the Fiction Editor of the literary magazine AGNI.  Jenna, still a Boston resident, now teaches at local writing school Grub Street Writers, where she has run classes for over a decade; she teaches the master novel workshop and writes writers' advice columns for the Grub Street Free Press.  Jenna also travels nationally to speak about Those Who Save Us and visits book clubs whether in person or by phone; she has attended over 800 book clubs in the greater Boston area alone. (From the author's website.)