about zach

Zach Jacobs mostly writes creative nonfiction. Some people call it literary nonfiction. It’s memoir. It’s personal essays. It’s some science writing and travel writing and other types of writing. It’s based on facts and uses approaches that authors use in the other three genres of literature: drama, fiction, and poetry. It’s pleasurable to read beyond the information it provides. Frankly, he doesn’t really care what people call it as long as they read it.

He’s originally from a small town in Nebraska, and he lives near Chicago now. He lived in Houston for several years in between. He even lived in Türkiye (Turkey) for a couple months one summer, too. He’s working on a book about that.

Zach’s been writing for over fifteen years and has a little to show for it. He even went to grad school to become a better writer. That’s not entirely true; he mostly went to grad school because he wanted to be an English professor, which worked out about as well as his aspiration of becoming a radiologist. Still, it helped, and he got a master’s degree out of it, but he has a long way to go to be the author that he wants to be. He’s working on it.

Most of his writing deals in some way with mental illness, suicide, addiction, masculinity, or “the body,” which is a short, fancy way of saying “his body and the human body in general.” His work asks questions and tries to find answers about why some of us are broken, how we are broken, and how we live with what seem to be perpetual cracks inside ourselves. He does this by doing research and exploring his own experiences.

Zach feels weird about writing all of this in the third person, but because this is a website about him, it somehow seems like the right thing to do. It’s customary to have a more professional author bio on a website like this too, so here’s one:

Zach Jacobs is originally from Bennington, Nebraska, but now lives just outside of Chicago, where he works at a public education nonprofit. His writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, Hobart, Sport Literate, the Indiana Review, the Sonora Review, The Los Angeles Review, and other literary journals. He is currently seeking a publisher for his memoir in essays about mental illness, addiction, masculinity, and body issues. He is also working on a memoir about the end of his marriage and an archaeological travel memoir.