Centering Place in Writing and Publishing — Alumni Profile, Jennifer Acker ’00

I first met Jennifer Acker ’00 in the fall of 2022, when I began working for the literary magazine The Common. And frankly, I was at first intimidated. After all, Jen holds many impressive titles: She is the director of LitFest, author of “The Limits of the World,” and founder and editor-in-chief of The Common.

But after weekly staff meetings and the occasional staff outing (turns out, Jen’s a pretty good bowler), I’ve gotten to know her better, beyond just her role as my boss, and more as a person and thinker — though the fact that she comes across as possibly the most organized and precise person I know is something that still intimidates me every once in a while.

Life in Maine

Jen grew up in rural Maine, in a small farming town called Whitefield. The town’s community was primarily working class, and many were part of the back-to-the-land movement, which emphasized total self-sufficiency.

Jen’s family, however, was not part of the back-to-the-land movement. Her parents were mental health professionals who moved from California because her father had grown up on a farm and wanted to live closer to the land. She was raised with a barn and animals, including several horses that she trained and rode.

Her grandparents lived just next door, and Jen was very close to them.

“That was a real privilege, to be able to spend so much time with them as a kid,” she said. “They picked me up from school and came to my soccer games and came into my classes to talk about Hanukkah to my classmates.”

As a kid, Jen did dozens of activities. She played soccer, was a competitive gymnast, and played “terrible basketball.” Growing up as an only child, she was a “voracious reader” and spent lots of her childhood reading books. She also spent a lot of time outdoors, “wandering underneath the pine trees” and biking with her dog.

Jen went to Whitefield’s small public school until eighth grade, but as the town did not have a high school, Jen commuted to one in Augusta, about 20 minutes away. She was a very focused student, and, because she skipped a grade, always the youngest in her classes.

And, being Jen, she dabbled in everything. Newspaper, choral groups, science fair, soccer team, track and field — she did it all.

When she started looking at colleges, she knew that she wanted to get out of Maine, but not much else.

“I didn’t know about Amherst, I didn’t know about small liberal arts colleges, except for Wellesley, because my grandmother had gone there, but that was like the only school that I knew about,” Jen said.

She and her parents started touring schools and when she visited Amherst, she was immediately drawn to how students were so multidisciplinary.

“It seemed like a place where students did everything, and you could be in an a capella group and play a sport and still take your classes seriously,” Jen said.

When she found out about early decision as a way to apply to college, she was sold: “I was like, ‘Oh, if I only have to apply to one school and I get in, that would be amazing that I don’t have to write all these other applications.’”

She applied early to Amherst and got in, but deferred for a year after her parents suggested she do a gap year. She had never traveled without her family except for a summer program in Greece with a group about a year before. But freshly out of high school and barely 17, Jen was off to Kenya by herself.

For the first six months of her gap year, Jen was part of a program in Kenya where she taught local children English. In the second part of her gap year, Jen went to Mexico and had more of a “DIY experience.”

“I just lived with [a local family] — and I worked in a local museum, I worked in a restaurant, and I did some volunteering stuff,” Jen said.

Kathy Klein ’00, Jen’s friend and junior-year roommate, said that Jen’s gap-year experience perhaps made her a more mature and independent person.

“[She had] her act together more than most of us do,” she said.

Discovering Anthropology at Amherst

The gap year shifted Jen’s academic interests. Though she was always passionate about many subjects, Jen had thought prior to her gap year that she would go into the biological sciences. But when she got to Amherst and stumbled into an anthropology class, she was reminded of her time abroad and quickly realized she wanted to major in anthropology.

“I thought ‘Oh, this really speaks to a lot of the things that I was thinking about during the gap year,” Jen said. “Like questions about, ‘How do you interact with other cultures when you’re not from that culture?’”

Aside from anthropology, Jen took Spanish classes and as many writing classes as she could. She took a lot of classes with Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans, who she formed a lifelong bond and later friendship with.

“She was very interested in writing and in poetry, in the spark of the written word — already a passionate reader, and she was also curious and devoted to literatures from other parts of the world,” Stavans said. “I have been blessed with a whole array of superb students whose friendship continues … and, happily, Jen is one of them.”

Outside of class, Jen ran on the cross country and track and field teams at Amherst.  

“One thing about being a cross country runner is that we explored this whole area, like within a 10-mile radius. I have run a lot of places just from campus, and so that was actually an amazing way to explore the area,” she said.

She also loved going to the Bookmill (serendipitously, she now lives right down the street from it) and volunteered in Holyoke for an organization called Nuestras Raíces, a community engagement center for the town’s Puerto Rican community.

In her junior year, Jen studied abroad (by which I mean she did a program in Maine, the place she tried to leave for college) in a documentary studies program. Students were paired in writer-photographer duos and conducted a deep ethnographic dive into a particular community. In Jen’s case, she wrote about men who fix the engines of trains.

Inspired by this program, her thesis was half-academic and half-documentary writing. She spent the summer before her senior year interviewing Guatemalan women who worked at an egg farm in Maine. While she wrote about immigration theory as it related to these women, the part that she most enjoyed was documenting their stories and experiences.

Jen knew by this point that she did not want to go into academia for anthropology. Instead, she wanted to be a writer, and possibly work at a non-profit where she could use her backgrounds in both anthropology and Spanish.

Writing after Amherst

For the first two years after she graduated from Amherst, Jen worked as a green dean in Amherst’s communications office, then called the public affairs office. Through this fellowship, she learned how to do many different types of writing: press releases, fundraising appeals, honorary degree citations, and feature stories for the alumni magazine.

After her stint as green dean, Jen freelanced for a couple of years. She wrote some things for the college, and she also worked for Stavans as “a sort of project manager,” including on an encyclopedia project. In her free time, Jen read tons of novels, started writing one of her own, and went to a few writing workshops.

Jen moved to New York when her now-husband Professor of Philosophy Nishi Shah went on his first sabbatical (the two had met when Shah first started working at Amherst). She finished the novel she’d been working on, which she never published (“You have to write a novel to learn how to write one,” she said, calling it her “apprenticeship novel”) — and got a job as an assistant managing editor for the book publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf.

Jen described her role as being at the “hub of the wheel,” with managing editors working with all departments that contribute to a book’s publication — design, production, editorial, etc. — to ensure everything goes smoothly. Though this job taught her a lot about publishing, she realized she did not want to work in book publishing long-term. After leaving Knopf, she proofread for a New York-based science publisher called Nature Publishing.

In 2009, Jen decided to get her MFA, attending the Bennington Writing Seminars program for fiction. Its tagline, “Read 100 books. Write one,” resonated with her.

“I think that appealed to me because I hadn’t been an English major, and so I was like, ‘Here’s my opportunity to read all the things that I haven’t read,’” she said.

During the two years she was in the master’s program, Jen was busy. She started her now-published novel, “The Limits of the World,” and began building a literary magazine that eventually became The Common.

The Common

In 2008, Jen was thinking about starting a literary magazine, both for pragmatic and idealistic reasons.

On the idealistic side, Jen wanted to create a space for writing that has “a strong sense of place.”

“Having been an anthropology major and done some traveling when I was younger, it was very salient to me how much place matters in your access to opportunity in the way you talk and the concerns that are relevant to you,” she said. “And so I spent a lot of time [thinking about], ‘What does it mean to be from somewhere?’”

Thinking practically, Jen needed a job. She was still freelancing for Nature Publishing, but there were not a lot of publishing opportunities based locally in the Pioneer Valley — where, after Shah received tenure, she knew she would be based for some time. Though teaching might have been an option, Jen was not really interested in that. A mentor, after hearing all of her concerns, suggested starting a literary magazine.

She remembered thinking that “Amherst seemed like a place that might eventually support an endeavor like that … with the literary history that it has and the pride in writing and the emphasis on reading and writing.” She started talking to people at the college about her ideas, and “once I started it,” she said, “I couldn’t stop.”

The Common was founded in 2011. As a department of the college, it receives funding from Amherst, and has its office nestled behind the DVDs in Frost Library’s A-level. It also does additional fundraising of its own.

The first issue’s publication was both thrilling and scary for Jen.

“It was really exciting, but it was also a huge challenge … Here we’ve made this thing, [but] does anybody care? Like, how do you get people to pay attention? How do you get people to notice it?” Jen said. “It was a real education in starting a business … You can have the best idea in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it can’t continue.”

Jen did everything she could to spread the word about The Common. She talked to people from her MFA program, other literary magazine editors, and even people at parties.

“I just took copies of the magazine everywhere with me, and I told everyone about it,” Jen said.

The Common was also the first time Jen truly did editorial work professionally, as its editor-in-chief. At Knopf, she was involved in the logistics of publishing, and at Nature Publishing, she proofread. Though she did not know beforehand how she would feel about editing work, Jen found she loved it.

“Some pieces come in and they’re very polished and they’re nearly ready to go, but a lot of pieces come in with a lot of promise, but just need a collaborator or another set of eyes,” she said. The Common, more than other literary magazines, has a very intensive editing process where editors work very closely with writers. It also had a small but close cohort of editors and student interns from the very beginning. These relationships are why she loves working at The Common.

“People that I get to work with by having this magazine [have] provided a really satisfying work life,” Jen said. “I wanted to create a community when I started The Common but I didn’t really know what that would look like, and so I just am grateful I get to work with [Managing Editor] Emily [Everett], and I get to work with student interns, and I get to work with wonderful authors — that all is a real privilege.”

In 2025, The Common will be celebrating 15 years of publishing.

“I am really proud about having launched a magazine that has some staying power,” Jen said. “I know how much work [was] required, not only of me, but of other people … And it makes me not only proud of my own work, but it makes me feel really good about the literary community.”

Jen says that The Common, and other literary magazines, are important for the opportunities they offer.

“Literary magazines are so crucial, both because they provide a forum for writers to do less commercial work — to publish things that are not going to sell a million copies and to really explore some literary spaces that are artistically worthy but maybe not commercially so viable — and also because they are where writers get their starts.”

“We publish work that is a lot of times more interesting than what publishers with a commercial focus would be able to do, because we are a nonprofit and we have a smaller readership. And with the subscriber model, it also means that we are a little bit more in charge. We’re not trying to publish something and then [trying to get] people to buy it. People have subscribed to the magazine because they believe that what we publish is going to be good, and they believe in the brand.”

LitFest

A few years after The Common’s founding, Jen approached then-Amherst College President Biddy Martin with the idea of a literary festival. While Amherst did already have a great creative writing reading series, Jen wanted to bring more of the outside literary world to campus, and establish a signature Amherst event that could be something for the whole campus.

“There are lots of students in different majors interested in reading novels and following contemporary poets, and so I just thought that there would be a lot of interest, and this was something that the college had the resources to offer to the community,” Jen explained.

In 2016, the college had its first LitFest. This year, in its 10th anniversary, LitFest’s guests include author Teju Cole, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases Anthony Fauci, writer and director Cord Jefferson, and actor Jeffrey Wright ’87.

“The Limits of the World”

Back in 2008, during her MFA program, Jen started working on what became her first published novel, “The Limits of the World.” It was largely inspired by the immigration story of her husband's family, and her time in Kenya during her gap year.

“A lot of people's first novels are autobiographical. Mine was more biographical than autobiographical,” Jen said. Shah’s parents were part of the Indian community living in East Africa, migrating from India to East Africa to the States. “So almost every generation [of] the family was moving to a different continent, which I thought was pretty extraordinary as a migration story … so I started doing some research about the context of immigration from India to East Africa and decided that that would be the story.”

Before she started writing it, she had to make sure Shah and his family were okay with her basing the novel on his family history, and that it was historically accurate.

“He read several drafts and helped a lot with the philosophy [components of the novel, with the main character, a first-generation Indian American, being a philosopher], and I talked to his parents quite a bit about their stories and some of their friends. But a lot of the research was book research, because … sometimes I was writing about time periods that were, like, 100 years ago or 80 years ago, and I didn’t have access to people that I could talk to about those time periods. So I was doing research, but I was reading primary sources,” Jen explained.

Jen said that writing from the perspective of a different racial or ethnic group than hers has “liabilities,” but that that is the risk of fiction writing.

“In fiction, we are always trying to cross boundaries and be empathetic and inhabit somebody else’s point of view,” she said.

Though she started the novel in 2008, for years, it was put on the backburner while she focused on establishing and growing The Common. She wrote chunks of it when she had free time, and after a while, she finished it. Jen found an agent in 2014, sold the novel in 2017, and in 2019, it was published.

“It felt great, like, finally, I was publishing my book. And I’d thought it might never happen,” Jen said. “It was kind of a difficult book in some ways, in terms of finding a market for it. I wouldn’t say it was, like, super commercial, and so it just needed to find the right match of editor and publisher.”

What’s Next

Jen is currently balancing multiple different projects: running The Common, working on two different novels, and writing a memoir about chronic illness and marriage that is the outgrowth of a 2021 essay published in Oprah Daily.

“[I’m always working] to find a balance between my magazine life and my writing life, because they’re both really important to me, and I don’t want to give either one of them up,” Jen said. “And some people who have my illness can’t work at all … So I’m really fortunate to be in a situation where I can maintain my work, and that I have a pretty supportive community.”

Emilie Eliason ’99 (who is also a board member for The Common), spoke to Jen’s grit, saying it is what she finds most impressive about Jen.

“I’ve seen her really blossom into … her determination and her persistence,” Eliason said. “She had a vision for The Common. And I think it’s one thing to have a vision, but it’s another to day after day execute that vision and make it a reality. … She doesn’t want to keep doing the same old — there is a desire to do things differently and to grow and to evolve.”