Jessamyn Hope is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. Her debut novel SAFEKEEPING was a Boston Globe recommended read; acclaimed by The Globe and Mail; a New York Public Library Staff Pick; a National Jewish Book Club pick; winner of the J.I. Segal Award; and a finalist for both the Harold U. Ribalow Prize and the Paterson Fiction Prize. Safekeeping can also be found at number two on BuzzFeed's "53 Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down." Her short stories and memoirs—originally published in Ploughshares, The Common, PRISM International, and other literary magazines—have received two Pushcart Prize honorable mentions, been named a Best American Notable Essay (2020), and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Essays, The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose, and The New Spice Box: Contemporary Jewish Writing. Hope was raised in Montreal by a mother who was born in Italy and a father who grew up in South Africa, where his grandparents had immigrated to from Lithuania. After living in Israel, she moved to New York City, which has been her home for the last twenty years. Aside from her obsession with literature and film, Jessamyn is an avid traveler who has backpacked in over fifty countries, from the Mongolian steppes to the Amazonian backwaters; ridden the trans-Siberian railway twice; and bicycled from Istanbul to Gibraltar. The rest is in her memoirs.