Jennifer Sinor Books

Focusing on the overlooked significance of everyday writing, this work centers around the diary of Jennifer Sinor's great-great-great-aunt, Annie Ray, a late 19th-century homesteader in the Dakotas. Sinor argues that such diaries, often dismissed for lacking literary merit, reveal complex negotiations between the writer and cultural norms. By redefining ordinary writing as a valuable site for understanding cultural practices, she challenges conventional literary analysis. The book blends creative storytelling with critical insights, making it a compelling read for students of creative writing and women's studies.

Georgia O'Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters. Jennifer Sinor's Letters Like the Day honors O'Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter's correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own.

Fusing the craft of writing with the philosophy of yoga, The Yogic Writer charts a path to the heart of creativity through the practice of yogic breathing, somatic exercises, and meditations. In response to an oftentimes paralyzing focus on outcome and product, Jennifer Sinor summons decades of experience teaching creative writing and yoga to guide our attention back to the body, the place from which all art arises. When invested with deep awareness, writing transforms us as human beings. The Yogic Writer connects the recursive process of writing – creating space for intentions, drafting, revision, and sitting in sites of possibility and potential – with the four stages of breath. Through brief insightful essays, Sinor meets writers in the present moment, providing craft advice while challenging us to explore how we look, who is really writing, and how to listen to our bodies. Steeped in ideas owed to ancient wisdom as well as creative writing pedagogy and Sinor's own experience, The Yogic Writer offers a unique, alternative approach to finding creativity that forsakes external validation for internal knowledge and experimentation. Inspirational, affirmational, and personal, this book is for anyone seeking permission to embody the life of a writer that they already know, deep down, to be theirs.