PRE-ORDER GIRLS PLAY DEAD
“With Girls Play Dead, Jen Percy captures an entire dimension of women’s experience that until now has remained unnameable. Through compelling voices, including her own, she tells of the often-surprising ways in which our bodies absorb shames and traumas great and small, and how far our minds can stretch to spin stories that help us survive. So many women have been waiting for a way to have this conversation—and here it is.”
Selected Articles & Features
New York Times Magazine
What People Misunderstand About Rape
Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.
The Haunted
How Does the Human Soul Survive Atrocity?
After the horror of ISIS captivity, tens of thousands of Iraqis — many of them children — are caught up in a mental-health crisis unlike any in the world.
About Jen
Jennifer Percy is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. She is the author of the nonfiction books GIRLS PLAY DEAD (Doubleday) and DEMON CAMP (Scribner), a New York Times Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.
Percy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship, as well as a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Percy has received numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Harper's, BookForum, The New Republic, Esquire, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University in NYC.