About Teddy Jones
Teddy Jones has been a nurse, nurse practitioner, university professor, college dean, and occasional farmhand. She grew up in a small north Texas town, Iowa Park, and gained college degrees in nursing at Incarnate Word and the University of Texas, a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. She held nursing, teaching, and administrative positions in Austin, Denver, and Lubbock and as a family nurse practitioner in Texas and New Mexico. Writing fiction was her “when I know enough and have the time” dream all those years. Now she and her husband live near Friona, in the Texas Panhandle, where her husband farms and she writes full time.
Prior to devoting her work to fiction, she wrote a monthly column for The Farmer Stockman, a farm magazine. She co-authored 100 Doses, a book of essays for rural women, and A Stone for Every Journey, a biographical novel. She also is the author of Left Early, Arrived Late, a biography. Her first novel, Halfwide was published in 2012. Jackson’s Pond, Texas, her second, was published in October 2013 and was a finalist in contemporary fiction for the Willa Award from Women Writing the West. She received the First Prize Gold Medal in Short Story in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition in 2015 for “Clean Getaway”, a story included in, Nowhere Near: Stories, published in 2017.
Press
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Reviews for Marva Cope
“The novel Marva Cope is a rarity— an artfully told “coming of age” story that morphs into a “getting on with life” saga that, in the end, celebrates the simple joys of human connection. Martha Burns, author of Blind Eye
“For the fortunate readers of Teddy Jones’s beloved Jackson Pond stories, the engaging novel, Marva Cope, is now here, with the eponymous Marva as the new postmaster in town. She and her peppy aunt live under one roof, jousting with one another affectionately, and wrestling with their own demons. At its heart, the book is how spirited, unconventional women find their way toward love—not a sappy, predictable love that entraps them in roles that stifle and imprison, but love that is big and free, engendering deep friendships and with luck, good partners. You will find the truth and bravery of lived life in these pages, and characters who will feel as real as anyone you know. Eleanor Morse, author of Margreete’s Harbor.
“In her trademark no-nonsense writing style, WILLA Literary Award Finalist Teddy Jones is back with a deeply reflective and rewarding new novel, Marva Cope. After two hard losses back-to-back during her youth growing up on a farm near a small town in Texas during the mid 1970s, Marva propels herself forward despite objections from friends and family who think they know what’s best for a young woman determined to make her own way in the world. The story whips seamlessly back and forth between the past in the seventies and eighties to the present time ––2017 and 2018.
At its heart, Marva Cope is a story about one woman’s evolution as she faces one challenge after another, from learning how to manage a working ranch on her own as a single mother, to dealing with abandonment from those she trusted the most, to reconnecting with people from her past and forging new friendships. I enjoyed all the references to small towns in south and west Texas and eastern and northeast New Mexico. Teddy Jones captured the spirit of the plains and the caprock, but this story could be set anywhere because it’s about the human struggle to create a good life despite the obstacles set before us. I’m counting on Marva to teach me how to be brave.
And if you’ve ever loved a dog, a dog as loyal as Bullet, you’ll want to read this novel just for the chance to meet him. I highly recommend it. Kathleen M. Rodgers, a 2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Contemporary Fiction for The Flying Cutterbucks
Selected reviews of prior publications
“In Making it Home,
Teddy Jones continues the rich, century-spanning saga of the Jackson family that she began two books ago with Jackson’s Pond, Texas. Jones’ talent for creating indelible characters endures, as does her way with a compelling plot. Indeed, Jones’ new novel boldly explores and exposes the existential threat posed to ‘home’ (dwelling/town/state/country/world) by white supremacy, homophobia, and xenophobia. This is a timely page-turner.” Robin Lippincott, author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell
Review of Slanted Light
“In Slanted Light, Teddy Jones has crafted a lyrical continuation of her Jackson’s Pond series centering on the Jackson/Banks/Havlicek ranching family in the rugged panhandle of modern-day Texas. Economic pressures and competing crises contribute to complicated family dynamics. Secrets, pride, temptations, and misunderstandings spring from these stressors and pull at the very fabric of their relationships. Thanks to the author’s astute insight into the psychology of human behavior, her knowledge of medicine and the corporate-driven system of healthcare delivery, along with the essential details of running a cattle operation during a four-year drought, Slanted Light is a compelling and authentic tale sure to whet your appetite to hear more from the resilient and inspiring folks who reside in Jackson’s Pond, Texas.” Sue Boggio, author, with Mare Pearl, of A Growing Season and Long Night Moon
Review for Jackson’s Pond, Texas
Jackson’s Pond reminds me of why I started reading in the first place, to be enchanted, to be swept up and carried away from my world and dropped into a world at once more vivid and incandescent. The prose is luminous and compassionate, the characters are riveting and heroic, the themes complex and resonant. Teddy Jones loves her characters and makes us love them, too. Jackson’s Pond is a heartfelt, redemptive, and irresistible family saga. Teddy knows that every story is many stories, and she handles the complex tales of romance, family, art, and secrets with intelligence, grace, and tenderness. — John Dufresne, author of No Regrets, Coyote
Review for Nowhere Near: Stories
“There’s so much goodness in these stories, the kind of goodness that grows out of characters who endure hard lessons leading them to revelations and deep understanding. You’ll find real people here, with real heartaches and mistakes and regrets. With language as true as music, a steady and perceptive eye, and at times a blazing humor, Teddy Jones creates fully imagined and realized worlds. Subtly, she makes strangeness ordinary and the ordinary strange. You will recognize the people in this book the way you recognize your own neighbors and friends and co- workers and family: full of annoying quirks and surprises and, finally, a saving grace.” —Eleanor Morse, author of White Dog Fell From the Sky
Review for Well Tended
“With grit and compassion, Teddy Jones’s novel, Well-Tended, tells not one love story, but several. It is the story of romantic love and familial love, yes—but it is also a love- song to the Western landscape and to a lifestyle that may be fading from American culture. The characters in Well Tended are sharp and real, seemingly chiseled out of the sandstone and rock of the place where they live. Teddy Jones may be one of the last true Western writers out there. She is certainly one of the best in the Western tradition.” —BK Loren, author of Theft: A Novel