Erin Jaukeena is a Black writer, educator, and mother committed to telling honest, complicated stories about Black women.

She writes upmarket contemporary, literary, and speculative fiction about Black women navigating the messy, contradictory realities of being human. Her novels explore grief, desire, motherhood, shame, aging, illness, loneliness, rage, family secrets, complicated love, and the strange work of trying to belong to yourself. Whether writing about the supernatural or the painfully ordinary, Erin is most interested in the places where joy and suffering coexist, and in women who are allowed to be funny, selfish, frightened, sexual, exhausted, loving, angry, contradictory, and gloriously unfinished.

Her fascination with those complicated lives began long before she thought of herself as a novelist. As a little girl, Erin was often told that her mouth was too big, that she argued too much, and that she was too confident in her words. She also spent nights writing beneath the covers, sometimes with tears in her eyes, trying to make sense of the world around her. She has been writing her way toward the things people struggle to say aloud ever since.

That instinct continues to shape her fiction. Erin begins with the questions people are often most afraid to answer honestly: What have I kept from the people I love because I am afraid they will judge me? Which parts of myself have I learned to hide? What do women confess with their faces in their hands when they finally feel safe enough to tell the truth? What happens in the space between “I’m okay” and what we actually mean?

Those questions become women on the page.

Erin is particularly drawn to Black women whose lives resist easy categorization. Women who make mistakes. Women who want things they believe they should not want. Women who survive and resent having needed to. Women who are still figuring themselves out long after the world has decided they should have all the answers. Her work is interested not only in the tears Black women cry in private, but also in our humor, friendships, absurdities, pleasures, desires, and joy.

Erin’s writing has appeared in Mission Magazine and cultural publications and blogs including Grandma Sophia’s Cookies. Before and alongside her work as a novelist and copywriter, she built a career as an educator, teaching literature and writing and developing curriculum and programming centered on identity, community, and systems of oppression and liberation. Her work as both a writer and educator continues to inform her fascination with the stories people inherit about who they are allowed to become, and what happens when they begin questioning those stories.

Above all, Erin writes toward recognition. She does not want every reader to see herself in every character. She wants a woman who has spent years believing some part of her experience was too ugly, strange, shameful, complicated, or insignificant to say aloud to encounter a character on the page and think:

Oh.

Her too.