About - J.A.Jablonski

About Me

JA Jablonski. Caucasian Middle-aged person with white bob hairstyle wearing blue eyeglasses.

J.A. Jablonski was born in Milwaukee, WI (USA) and is one of ten children of a university professor and college administrative assistant. Jude worked their way up from flipping burgers, cleaning school classrooms, selling fabric, and assistant managing a bookstore to eventually making their way into academe where they finished 2 degrees in English (BA, MA) and 2 in Information Studies (MSLIS, PhD). They have taught in both disciplines: professional and academic writing, science fiction and fantasy literature, information organization, and database indexing.

She’s been a storyteller/maker for as long as she can remember. Telling and making go hand-in-hand; in part, she says, because her family are all natural storytellers who are also creatively talented, e.g., fine artists, wood crafters, writers, urban planners, calligraphers, automotive repair and paint artists, photographers, and clothing, costume, theater set designers. She herself has been a graphic designer, award-winning display window and exhibits designer, fictional letter writer, live-action role playing actor, theater designer and seamstress.

Jude currently writes in three different genres (mystery, speculative SF, and magical realism) while trying to still keep one foot in the academic scene by researching material culture in utopian fiction. Their pronouns are she/her/them/they; their honorifics are Dr/Ms/Mx.

WRITINGS: Professional | Mystery | Science Fiction/Magical Realism

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A few fun facts

Nope, despite being almost 6’4″ I do not play basketball. My students did like to call me Dr. J though.
I once dreamt I was an NHL defenseman (although I cannot skate). As a much younger person I wanted to be an archaeologist or paleontologist but, being exceedingly sun-sensitive, that did not happen.
My (mostly) current library via Library Thing.
As an undergraduate archives assistant I processed and created the in-house indexes for the J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscript Collection for the Special Collections and University Archives of Marquette University.
I am an avid reader of fiction (regular and speculative SF, literary and historical works) and nonfiction (biography, history, anthropology, cartography, art history, and sociology).
I am a total style guide nerd! (Fave is The Chicago Manual of Style followed by APA.)
When in my 20s I wrote a letter to author Ursula K. Le Guin that was very critical of her then just-released book Tehanu. She wrote me back and said, in essence, see if you can do better! A few years ago I wrote her again and apologized for being such a twit. I’d just started grad school, I told her, in English Lit, and was quite full of myself. She replied again and said “I wish I remembered your letter . . . . I got a bit snappish. I can say now that you are certainly not a twit. Anybody who can learn, and change, and admit it, isn’t a twit. You are a mensch. Thanks a lot. All the best, Ursula.”