| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Young adult |
| Notableworks: | The Summer of Bitter and Sweet |
| Years Active: | 2021–present |
| Occupation: | novelist, professor |
| Nationality: | Canadian, Métis |
| Alma Mater: | University of South Dakota |
| Awards: | Governor's General Award, Stonewall Honor, 2022 Cybils Award |
Jen Ferguson is a Michif/Métis Canadian writer, activist, and academic of young adult fiction. She is best known for her Governor General's Award-winning and William C. Morris Award-nominated debut novel The Summer of Bitter and Sweet.[1]
Ferguson is of Michif/Métis and Canadian settler heritage and identifies as queer.[2]
She considers herself an army brat and grew up moving around in Canada, spending a few years in Calgary, and then moving to Lloydminster, which she says was the first place where she witnessed anti-indigenous violence.[3]
The first book she remembers reading is Caroline B. Cooney’s The Face on The Milk Carton.[4]
Ferguson has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of South Dakota.[5] She teaches fiction writing at Coe College.[5] [6]
Her debut novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, was published by Heartdrum in 2022.
The Summer of Bitter and Sweet won the Governor General's Award and received starred reviews from Booklist,[7] BookPage, Kirkus Reviews,[8] and School Library Journal.[9] It was also a finalist for the 2023 William C. Morris Award,[10] as well as a Stonewall Honor Book in Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2023,[11] and the 2022 Cybils’ Award for Young Adult Literature.[12]
Her second novel, Those Pink Mountain Nights, is a sequel to her debut and was published by Heartdrum in 2023. It is about an indigenous teen working her first job at an Alberta pizza shop and coming of age. It explores the topic of missing and murdered indigenous women, mental health, and sexuality.
It was inspired by her experience working in a pizza shop in the Canadian prairie when she was 16, a screenplay about a pizza shop she wrote in her early 20s, and the "ongoing human rights crisis happening in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico".