About Jessica


Photo by Blair Ann Photography Studios

Jessica Leeder is an Emmy award-winning storyteller whose fiction, essays and journalism has been widely published in periodicals around the world. Most recently, Jessica has published the short stories Get What You Want (2023), The Instructions (2022), and Inside the Pines (2022); she currently writing her first novel, which she's been working up the gumption to start since the first grade, when she discovered the wild magic that can happen with a sharp pencil and a stack of lined paper. 

Jessica began her writing career working for newspapers, including the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Assignments for their investigative and foreign desks required her to report from across Canada, the United States, Haiti, and Afghanistan; from doorsteps, tents, court houses, helicopters and even a Navy ship (thankfully, she packed Gravol). After a family move to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Globe appointed Jessica as the paper's Atlantic Bureau Chief; she was responsible for coverage across four provinces until her return to Ontario in 2019.

Jessica's work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including an Emmy (News and Documentary), a National Newspaper Award, several National Magazine awards, Digital Publishing Awards, Webby Awards and an Atlantic Journalism Award Gold Medal. She is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Access Copyright Foundation and The Writers' Union of Canada for their generous support of her fiction writing.


MORE ABOUT JESSICA

Jessica was born and raised in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, a small working-class city that hugs the shores of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. With voracious readers for parents, Jessica grew up with a fervent love of books and writing. By high school, she was keenly aware of living just one county away from Alice Munro and dreamt of becoming a writer herself, somehow. 

Jessica received her Hons. B.A. in media studies and political science from Western University (formerly the University of Western Ontario) with an unofficial minor in journalism thanks to her work at The Gazette, the daily student-run campus newspaper. Pursuing journalism seemed the best way to get paid to write for a living and Jessica did just that. She took contract jobs at the National Post, Toronto Star and the Edmonton Journal in (very cold, very far) Alberta. In 2004, she was accepted to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She graduated with a Master of Science in Journalism in 2005. Jessica relocated to Dallas, TX to work at the Dallas Morning News and learned that walking outside in the summer months to buy lunch will indeed melt the bottom of one's kitten heels. She did it anyhow and, with the help of an investigative partner, exposed a fraudster who was stealing money from the country's second largest school district. He wound up in jail and Jessica returned to Toronto to work on the investigative team at the Star. 

She moved over to The Globe and Mail in 2007.

Jessica eventually left full time newspaper work to pursue magazine freelance and other writing opportunities, including her dream of writing fiction. Her reported articles and essays have appeared in The Walrus, Chatelaine, Today's Parent, MaRS Discovery District Magazine, Zoomer, Reader's Digest. Her short fiction has been published by Gutter Magazine in Scotland, Epiphany Magazine in New York and the West Trade Review in North Carolina. 

Jessica currently lives outside of Toronto with her husband, two children, the best (but most genetically flawed and thus surgically repaired) chocolate Labrador in the world and two cats (even though she is not a cat person and yes, there probably is a cat asleep on her lap as you read this). 

 

AWARDS

  • National Magazine Awards, Honorable Mention, Long form 2022

  • Atlantic Journalism Award, Gold, Enterprise Reporting, 2019

  • Atlantic Journalism Award, Gold, Best Personally Essay 2019

  • Digital Publishing Awards, Best Mini Documentary 2018 

  • Digital Publishing Awards, Service Journalism 2018 

  • National Magazine Award, Best Digital Editoral Package, 2015

  • National Newspaper Award, Multimedia Project 2010

  • TABBIE Award, Best Front Cover Photograph (Professionally Speaking) 2010

  • Emmy Award, 2009

  • Webby Award, 2009

  • EpPy Award, 2009

  • Star Investigative Report of the Year / Texas Associate Press Managing Editors' Award (2005)

EDUCATION

  • Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, M.I.T. (2010)

  • Master of Science in Journalism, Columbia University (2005)

  • HBA, University of Western Ontario (2003)