Janet Jennings grew up in a Midwestern chocolate-making family. In her teens she worked summers at the factory, amidst the smell of roasting cocoa beans, where she packed twenty-five pound boxes of chocolate drops and learned to drive a forklift. This experience proved surprisingly useful when she started Sunspire Natural Foods, which she ran for twenty years until other interests called.

Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Nimrod, the Sixteen Rivers anthology America, We Call Your Name, and elsewhere. She is the author of Traces in Water, and lives with her husband and twin daughters in San Anselmo, California.