Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness.

 

​Jax's braided, collage, flash, and formally experimental essays have received honors including four Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere Magazine's Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, and first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, among others. They were a finalist for The Bellingham Review's 2024 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, Black Warrior Review's 2023 flash contest, Fourth Genre's 2021 Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, and New Letters' 2021 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades, No Tokens, The Seneca Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and more.

 

Jax has received residency awards from Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. They hold an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and a day job in tech marketing, and they are currently working on an essay collection, a book-length essay, and a memoir.​ She lives in Rogers Park, Chicago.