Brox, Jane (1956 - )

Genre: Non-Fiction

Non-fiction writer Jane Brox (born Sept. 4, 1956) grew up on a farm in Dracut, Mass., in the Merrimack Valley. She received a B.A. in English Lit (1978) from Colby College and an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Brox lived on Nantucket and in Cambridge, and eventually moved back to the farm to help her family with it and the farmstand.

For many years she taught creative writing at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge; she now teaches in Lesley College's low-residency MFA program. She lives in Brunswick, ME.

She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Grant and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. Her essays appear in The American Scholar, the Boston Sunday Globe, CommonWealth, The Georgia Review, and the New England Review.

Selected Bibliography

  • Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family (1995), about her return to the family farm after years away. Winner of the 1996 Winship/PEN New England Award
  • Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (1999), a history of her family and generations who worked on the farm, using primary sources
  • Clearing Land: Legacies of an American Farm (2004), about 'local food issues, land usage, and the dying off of small family New England farms.'
  • Brilliant: the Evolution of Artificial Light (2010)
  • Silence: A Social History of one of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives (2019)

Anthologies

  • Best American Essays
  • The Norton Book of Nature Writing
  • Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Selected Resources

  • A 2004 New York Times article about Brox is accompanied by a photo of her family's farmhouse.
  • Jessa Crispin at Bookslut interviewed Brox in Jan. 2005
  • A short essay by Brox is online at the Colby Magazine website.