Andrew Karre, friend and editor

In most years, I saw Jennifer once (at NCTE/ALAN, of course), and I emailed with her a handful of times. If I was lucky, I got to visit her class via Zoom. Even so, those few encounters every year meant the world to me, and I find it incredibly difficult to contemplate that there will never be another one.

Jennifer was an ideal reader with near-magical powers of literary perception. She was infinitely generous with authors. There was no greater pleasure in my job than telling writers that Jennifer had read their work, that Jennifer wanted to have them on a panel, that Jennifer had a note to share. In the last weeks, I’ve reread some of the notes on manuscripts, and they’re even more wonderful than I remembered. What a gift she had for reading deeply and generously.

I can only imagine how transformational she was for her own students, how many stellar teaching careers she launched with her wisdom and passion for books. If you’ve been lucky enough to have an advocate like her in your life, you know it.

It’s been a couple weeks since I heard the news of her passing—from a bereft author whose work she tirelessly championed, of course—and I still cannot accept that her relentless pencil is still and that her note-taking has ceased. I don’t want to believe it. But I will continue to do my work, in large part because I believe in what Jennifer believed in: that books and authors must be constantly nurtured—nurtured by editors and teachers and relentless readers like she was.

She will never be forgotten.

—Andrew Karre