Crusie was born as Jennifer Smith in
Wapakoneta, Ohio to Jack and JoAnn Smith. She chose to honor her maternal grandmother by writing under her grandmother's maiden name, Crusie. Her second master's degree is an
MFA in Fiction from
Ohio State University. Crusie's first career was a teacher, beginning with pre-school, then elementary and junior high art, high school English, and undergraduate college English courses, including 15 years in the
Beavercreek, Ohio public school system. Her teaching subjects included art, literature, mythology, the Bible in literature, college composition, creative writing, and British and American literature, as well as time spent directing the sets and costumes crews for the high school's drama department. She quit her job in the summer of 1991 to devote herself full-time to writing. After a ten-year hiatus from publishing, Crusie began again in collaboration again with Bob Mayer, experimenting with self-publishing. Crusie's books are known for their humor, although she says she has never "deliberately written to be funny. ... I think my characters just have a particular kind of sense of humor. They use it the way a lot of people do, to cope with the absurdities of life." In August 2007, their second
collaborative novel,
Agnes and the Hitman, was released and made the New York Times best seller list. They again partnered up for March 2010's release of
Wild Ride. Crusie has also collaborated with
Eileen Dreyer and
Anne Stuart on
The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes (2007), and on
Dogs and Goddesses (2009) with
Anne Stuart and Lani Diane Rich. This is Crusie's version of Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw. In Crusie's version the governess is not young and inexperienced, the children are not perfectly behaved, they are not isolated because house guests keep turning up and moving in, and the faraway guardian turns up and becomes part of the story.
Rest in Pink, and
One in Vermillion - came out in 2023 and the second -
Rocky Start,
Very Nice Funerals, and
The Honey Pot Plot - came out in 2024 and early 2025. She also continues her interest in the academic side of fiction. Early in her academic career, she published a book of
literary criticism on
Anne Rice under the name Jennifer Smith; and she's been active in pop culture criticism, both on her blog Argh Ink and for Benbella Press, editing three essay collections and contributing to others.. ==Awards and honors==