About
Jessica Willingham is the author of Catfish Belly, forthcoming from Belle Point Press. Her debut collection was named a semi-finalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award, and her work has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology (2023, 2024) and Best Microfiction (2025) and was longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions (2024). She is a 2026 Woody Guthrie Poet and a 2026 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence in poetry.
She is a graduate of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project (2019–2021) in Denver, Colorado, and serves as an associate editor at L’Esprit Literary Review and Indirect Books. She is a submission reader for Bicoastal Review, Fractured Literary, and The Masters Review.
Her work appears in Hell Is Real: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, Identity Theory, Mississippi Review, and Variant Literature, among others.
She lives in Oklahoma.
Featured Work
“What the Continental Divide Taught Me About Collard Greens"
“What the Continental Divide Taught Me About Collard Greens" was published in Spring 2026, in The Mississippi Review's The Nature Issue 53.3.
