Jen Percy is a graduate of the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship in fiction. She also received an Iowa Arts Fellowship from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. She won of a Pushcart Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Foundation. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Harper’s, The New Republic, and The Oxford American. She has taught writing at
New York University and
Columbia University. Percy's first book, ''Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism
, was published in 2014 by Simon and Schuster and was reviewed by the New York Times''. The book focuses on
post-traumatic stress disorder and what it means to be haunted by trauma. Percy drew inspiration from a newspaper article the suicide of a man haunted by an Iraqi soldier he’d killed, talking to his ghost every night. She too became almost haunted by bats which were seemingly following her. One morning, she found a cereal bowl with a dead bat in the milk. == Awards and honors ==