jenny van alstyne writes

As a young child, I craved stories. I spent countless hours sitting at my grandmother’s desk with a heap of broken crayons, scrawling jumbles of letters. For shortly after learning my letters, I took delight in assuring myself any assortment of letters must claim a word. With this belief I created pages and pages of letters, which I believed to be words building grand stories. Possessing the unabashed confidence of a small child, I doodled away, creating unencumbered flights of fantasy. In the haven of my grandmother’s house, my imagination was allowed to roam free. 

After graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, I became a caregiver for my grandmother during her battle with Alzheimer’s disease. My grandmother, a woman of great kindness and courage, faced the shifting landscape of ensnaring synapse tangles as I attempted to help her navigate the unsteady terrain. She was and will always be my hero; I created The Memory Keeper: Rise of the Arspiri as a tribute to her.

In The Memory Keeper: Rise of the Arspiri, a young adult speculative fantasy, a sixteen-year-old factory worker, must breathe life into her art to salvage her mother's dwindling memories amidst a regime of memory thievery.

I am currently creating a poetry collection, Light Falls Glorious and Garish, a meditation on dreams, childhood, and the landscape of memory. 

In addition to writing and illustrating, I am also a singer-songwriter. To learn more about my music, please visit jennyvanalstyne.com 

As a child I believed in the power of stories, and as an adult I still cling steadfastly to this belief. The words of a story can build hope for a better world. With every dream and every fleck of wonder sparked by a story in the eyes of my niece and nephew, I find this to be true.