Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and writing coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, Ecotone, Terrain.org, and Poetry Northwest. She is currently a poetry editor for The Hopper. Her memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in September 2022.

Her educational background is in biology and horticulture (PhD, 2011) and she spent years studying nature, from a distance, through the lens of Western science. Her classes and research took her into Vermont wildflower meadows teeming with bumble bees, digging in muddy potato fields in Washington, and counting hundreds upon hundreds of nematodes in the microscope. Jessica loved what she was learning, but she also needed a better way to connect with and care for herself and the beauty of the land around her. After several sessions of morning pages and a chance encounter with her favorite nature poet, she knew she was meant to be a writer. She returned to school to pursue her passion for poetry and creative nonfiction (MFA, 2014).

As a teacher and writing coach, Jessica is grateful for the chance to work with students and clients both in-person and online. You can also find her tending her small sheep farm in the Skagit Valley, attending a reading or hosting a writing group at Village Books, playing at the beach with her husband and two daughters, or running around a tennis court.