FSP Friends

14 September, 2026

At first, Jennifer was a voice. We met her in Spring 2023 as part of the Faculty Success Program Bootcamp, a national coaching program that provides faculty with “structure, accountability, and support.” We four were grouped together as mid-career associate professors. In weekly conference calls with our coach, we shared pieces of our academic histories, our goals, and our struggles. The coach structured the call so everyone had equal time to share the week’s high and low points and set goals for the coming week. Jennifer was in an intensive stage of caregiving with her father, and her academic life intertwined with frequent trips to Kentucky. On the weekly calls, despite having so much on her plate, she was always attentive and attuned to getting to know us. She was immediately a kind, calm, open presence. It would be easy to be cynical about some of the self-help vocabulary of FSP, but Jennifer made it meaningful with an open heart and exceptional listening. She would hear and reframe what we said, bringing back past insights at just the right moment. On those voice calls, we couldn’t see her taking notes, but she listened and remembered, so she must have had an excellent system for recording and remembering conversations. She treated our conversations with a perfect balance of gravity and wit. The coach remarked that our group “clicked.” Jennifer was a key connector.

After the FSP semester, we said goodbye to the coach and became each other’s coaches. We also switched to Zoom and, with relationships already established, put faces to names. We came to know Jennifer mainly in her SLU office, books perfectly organized behind her and needlework in her hands, in a box on the screen but never contained by it. Over weekly conversations, we heard snippets of her life, always focused on the people important to her: Mark and her sister, Ethan and Lily, Dad and the people in his retirement home, Meg and her Mendings book, GA Kate, Girl Scouts. She started her Judy Blume project. During one of our calls, Marianne mentioned Yale’s fellowships, and Jennifer later got one! We remember her joining our Zoom from the lawn outside the Beinecke, at once tired after a long day with the papers and energized by the richness of the archive. She later wrote a letter to Judy–always Judy, in Jennifer’s voice–just like one of the adolescents whose letters she read at the Beinecke. She took writing to Judy seriously, with a sense of the biographer’s responsibility to treat both the archive and the person ethically and with dignity. She had binders full of notes. We would encourage her to revisit them, to “touch the project” at times when teaching and service became all-consuming. She honed her voice writing op-eds about book bans, always with the Judy project simmering behind them.

Her trips to Yale also helped us to connect, finally, in person. Chloe came down from Trinity a few times, meeting Jennifer outside of the library and hearing about the day’s discoveries in the boxes of materials that Jennifer had so carefully pre-selected before her arrival at the Beinecke reading room. Chloe especially remembers Jennifer’s delight at coming upon scribbles on the edges of official documents, places where Judy’s public life and personal voice mingled together in startling ways. For a special treat (a break from the standard fare of overnight oats in the Mason jar), they would go to Claire’s Corner Copia, a favorite restaurant from Jennifer’s undergraduate days. The research trips to Yale were for Jennifer moments of concentrated, almost monastic attention, and Chloe still feels so blessed that Jennifer carved out time for their visits during these periods of absorbed focus.

LaDawn first met her face-to-face in New York this past summer. Jennifer was attending a conference on biography at the CUNY Graduate Center and met her at a lovely outdoor cafe on the Upper West Side, where they talked of the City, books, the vicissitudes of career and life. LaDawn, feeling comfortable, later feared that she had scandalized Jennifer with her working-class swearing. That afternoon, Jennifer put her mind at ease with text: a Mark Twain quote that said, “Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” Always gravitating to libraries and archives, Jennifer’s favorite place to work in the city was across from the New York Public Library and Jennifer and LaDawn planned to meet there some months later. But due to a delayed train, they instead met under the clock at Grand Central, as Jennifer hurried to meet Ethan and Lily. They laughed about the romanticism of it all! LaDawn gave her an “I Love NY” t-shirt that she wore with aplomb. Jennifer passed on a second, red shirt to Lily, saying graciously that it was “not quite her style.” Later that week, she proudly sent a photo of Ethan, their friend Hunter, and Lily looking very lovely in red.

Marianne was lucky to meet Jennifer, in her home city of Saint Louis, when she came for a conference in November 2025 and Jennifer picked her up at the airport and took her to breakfast near SLU. Navigating the highway while talking with great enthusiasm about her students, local bookstores, and new books, Jennifer’s in-person presence was even more amazing than on Zoom. Her gift of conversation–of listening and connecting–was unmatched.

One of the core FSP concepts is that a career, and a life, is a book with many chapters. We witnessed Jennifer’s progress as a scholar with her archival work on the Judy project. Her recent article about Michael Cart honored her mentor as she moved into a new phase of her own career. We watched her do all this work with the same care she brought to her relationship with us. We mourn her unwritten chapters. We mourn the loss of an extraordinary voice in her field, in her community, and in our FSP Friends group, which will go on with her absence always felt and her encouraging voice in our heads and in our hearts. We had the immense privilege of reading a few chapters of Jennifer’s book. We will do our own parts, both collectively and individually, to live up to her example.

LaDawn Haglund, Marianne Montgomery, and Chloe Wheatley

Jennifer’s FSP Friends