Jess Heron

Originally from New York City’s Mafia Borough AKA Shaolin AKA Staten Island, Jessica Heron has lived in all three regions of The Garden State AKA The Armpit of America AKA New Jersey and is currently biding her time within the “Outer Coastal Plain” region of the Pine Barrens, more popularly known as “The Jersey Shore”. Land acknowledgment: Lenape Nation.

Jess is a poet, applied linguist, educator, and sick af. Her poems have appeared in Let’s Stab Caesar!, Horror Sleaze Trash, Hot Pink Mag, BRUISER, The Daily Drunk, Tiny Spoon, and many other locations. Jess recently served as Poetry Editor for Blood + Honey, and has been a Poetry Reader and Lead Fiction Reader for Okay Donkey Magazine since 2023. Formerly she was a radio DJ, international backpacker, accent coach, wife that one time for that one year, lifeguard/hero, church choir singer, bus person, sensitive document translator, and always, always, your friend. And sometimes, sometimes, a Best of the Net nominee (2026, baby!)

Jessica has studied and received degrees in filmmaking, literature, linguistics, and poetry throughout institutions based in USA and Europe, and is officially done with school and anything else resembling a schedule, and she would really like to stay home for a while, which she discovered in Riga, Latvia as Chestnut Review’s 2025 writing retreat scholar, along with the meaning of home in homesick. She thanks Chestnut Review for this beautiful epiphany and many other fun learnings.

Jess enjoys taking her morning coffee on the patio while the bees are sleeping, taking short walks on a cold beach and getting sand in her car, and she is enamored with the absurd and the sublime and the profane and the ridiculous and the beauty and the agony and the transcendent in poetry, and in all things.