Jessica is an award-winning author of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Her research expertise spans creative and critical writing, life writing studies, Australian literary studies, disability studies, and climate fiction and the environmental humanities more broadly. Jessica was a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts, and is co-founder of a journal of creative writing inspired by science, Science Write Now. She is Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council Discovery Project Finding Australia's Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community (DP240103154).
Jessica's short fiction, essays and poetry have won awards and shortlistings and appeared in national and international literary journals. Jessica is also the recipient of funding and residencies from the Australia Research Council, Creative Australia, Arts Queensland, Arts South Australia, the Copyright Agency, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the IASH Environmental Humanities group at the University of Edinburgh.
Jessica's critical writing has been published in national and international journals in the fields of Australian literature, ecocriticism, nineteenth century literature, life writing and literary representations of disability. From 2016-2019 she was an Australia Research Council DECRA fellow at The University of Queensland, during which time she oversaw the creation of the Writing Disability in Australia dataset in the AustLit database to draw attention to representations of disability in Australian literature. Jessica is currently writing an ecobiography about Western Australia botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843) and the plants that transformed her life. Her collection of essays, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, will be published in 2025.