Jay Jennings

Jay Jennings is an award-winning journalist, screenwriter, and editor. His screenplay A Treacherous Country, adapted from the novel by K.M. Kruimink, won the 2025 Byron Bay (Australia) International Film Festival's screenplay competition. His screenplay based on the Charles Portis novel The Dog of the South (co-written with Graham Gordy) is currently in development.

In 2023, he edited the Library of America's one-volume Charles Portis: Collected Works, and his nonfiction book Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City, originally published in 2010, was reissued by the University of Arkansas Press with a new author's introduction. The Wall Street Journal’s review said the book, about the Little Rock (Ark.) Central High School football team fifty years after the 1957 integration crisis, “transcends the season-on-the-brink genre.” In 2023, he also won the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, given to an Arkansas writer for contribution to the literature of the state.

Earlier, he edited Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, which collected the reportage, travel writing, short stories, and drama by the novelist best-known for True Grit. The collection was named Book of the Year for 2012 by Books & Culture, and the New York Times Book Review called it “a thoughtfully composed selection of published work spiced with rare and fresh material.”

He began his writing career as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, followed by four years as features editor at Tennis magazine. While at the latter, he edited an anthology of short stories and poetry called Tennis and the Meaning of Life (Breakaway Books, 1999), which the New Yorker called “a delight—and perhaps a surprise—to those who know and care about literature.”

His work has been recognized by The Best American Sports Writing annual and has appeared in the humor anthology Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor. A regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, he is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow in fiction and a winner of a fiction grant from the Arkansas Arts Council for a novel-in-progress. His journalism has appeared in many national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Lowbrow Reader, Garden & Gun, Travel & Leisure and Oxford American, where he was formerly a senior editor.