Signing books at Seattle's Tower Books

Jennifer is an award-winning arts journalist and worked as art critic for many years. In 2000, she founded The Arts Paper: A Cultural Journal of the Boulder Arts Commission, which received wonderful acclaim. It folded in 2003, when the bottom fell out of funding for the arts. In 1992, she curated a national touring exhibition of velvet art, accompanied by the book, Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate. She is now considered the country’s leading expert in black velvet painting! She has since curated various art exhibitions, most recently The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces, a traveling show that opens in May 2008.

With Kristine Smock during street performance against the Gulf War in 1990.

Jennifer is an avid environmentalist and gardener and has been a peace activist all her life. Her book, The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory, is a meditation on nature and the environment. In that book, which has developed an ardent following, she proposes that human beings can begin to develop a sense of place on the Earth within the sanctuary of gardens. In 2007, she assembled Uncontained: Writers and Photographers in the Garden and the Margins through Baksun Books as yet another contemplation on the our endangered ecology.

In 2001, after the tragedy of September 11, Jennifer started a living-room action, “Seeds for Afghanistan,” which has collected and distributed nearly two million packages of vegetable and flower seeds to the hungry people of Afghanistan. Afghans4Tomorrow -- www.afghans4tomorrow -- and Afghanistan Relief Organization -- www.afghanrelief.com -- are Seeds for Afghanistan's umbrella organizations. More information about Seeds for Afghanistan and its greenhouse projects can be found on the ARO and A4T Web sites. Seeds for Afghanistan has been the recipient of various humanitarian awards.

With Wahid Omar and Betsy Tobin in There Was and There Was Not: Wonder Tales of the Islamic World.

Proceeds from the second printing of A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan (produced the second time as an illustrated “novel in newspaper form”) are donated entirely to Afghans4Tomorrow.

Jennifer’s interest in Islam and in cultures associated with Islam and its history, led her to research and write The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam. Following a visit to Egypt, where she had a fellowship to the Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival, Jennifer collaborated with the extraordinary designer/director Betsy Tobin,to create a lush shadow and live theatre and storytelling production, There Was and There Was Not: Wonder Tales of the Islamic World. In 2008, the University of California Press launched her edited anthology, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics.

With husband, Jack Collom.

She is currently working with Dr. Ashraf Zahedi, a sociologist associated with the University of California, on a new anthology tentatively titled, Women of Afghanistan in the Post-9/11 Era: Paths to Empowerment. Her manuscript, The Jewel and the Ember: Love Stories of the Islamic World is currently seeking a home through her long-time representative, Ellen Geiger at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Jennifer is married to poet Jack Collom. She is the mother of Matthew Heath, currently living, working and raising a family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is also an actor. Her daughter, painter and comix artist Sarah C. Bell, illustrated Jennifer’s novel, El Repelente (Oor the Anti-Nuke Antics of Anabela). Sarah’s book La Niña: Urban Fairy Tales was published in 1996.