A sixth-generation Texan, Jennifer Cranfill studied medieval history at Cambridge before joining Southwest Review as senior editor in 2004, becoming the youngest female fiction editor in the quarterly’s distinguished history. Works she selected for SwR were included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, and the O. Henry Prize Stories, in addition to other honors, and featured SwR authors included Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Hoffman, and Arthur Miller. She established the inaugural Meyerson Award for Fiction, dedicated to discovering new, unpublished talent, and in 2009 created and curated a special issue of Southwest Review titled “Modern Fiction from Arab Women,” a project supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
She’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in literature and 2025-2026 Dean’s Teaching Fellow at the University of Texas, Dallas. Her academic work examines aesthetics in fiction spanning the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Her short fiction has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Cold Mountain Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2023-2024 Robert S. Nelson Scholarship in Creative Writing.
Jennifer Cranfill 
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