My name is Jessy Ayn Reine. I was born at dawn on November 8, 1986. I was a girl of the Northeast, of Connecticut lakes and Pennsylvania rivers, drafty houses and geese flying in on the grass. Summers I’d stay at my grandparents’ in the dust-covered valley of Bakersfield, north of Los Angeles, swimming in a black-bottomed pool, my ancestors being Cherokee-Okies who had come during the Dust Bowl, enduring starvation, to settle forevermore in a land without winter. Whereas my father’s family lived buttoned up in suits or sweaters with rhinestones in a corner of Forest Hills, Queens, a mezuzah over their doorway, where I learned to like purple horseradish as a child, and would eventually lose myself in various corners, and scenes of New York City for the entirety of my coming of age. Writing is my medium and I have been chronicling my consciousness in novels, short stories, and novellas since I was eight. In 2023 I started Imum Press, to publish my literature through the art of hand-binding. I’m also a forager, a maker of medicines, a gardener, a fire maker, an intuitive cook, and a practicing intuitive—specializing in astrological readings and kabbalistic tarot. I live in the Hudson Valley in the shadow of the Shawangunks in a yurt with my partner and son and daughter a stone’s throw from the Interstate. I embrace paradox.