Jodi Daynard Books in Order

Jodi Daynard was born in Bronxville, New York, and grew up in Hartsdale, in Westchester County. Long before she published novels, she was the kind of kid who made books for fun. She has said her first one, written while she was home sick in first grade, leaned a little too hard on One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

Writing stayed with her, even when publication didn't come quickly. In her twenties she worked temp jobs, usually at night, so she could write by day. Around the same time she was publishing reviews, essays, and short fiction, and she has told a very good story about reviewing books for The New York Times Book Review while holding a temp job elsewhere in the same building.

She kept going.

Daynard wrote several early novels that never made it into print, and she's been cheerfully blunt about them ever since. But those practice books taught her craft. They also led to a wider body of work that included essays, criticism, and The Place Within, an anthology of writing about American landscapes. Some of her essays were later noted in Best American Essays.

A major turn came through history. Daynard studied European history in graduate school at Columbia, then became deeply interested in early America. Reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale helped spark The Midwife's Revolt: a midwife, after all, moves through every level of a community's life, from births to illness to death, and would know things other people miss.

That idea opened up the work many readers know her for now. The Midwife's Revolt began as a self-published novel after agents and editors told her there was no market for American historical fiction. It found its audience anyway, was later reissued more widely, and grew into the Midwife trilogy with Our Own Country and A More Perfect Union.

Her fiction returns again and again to people on the edges of power. In the Midwife books, that means women doing vital work, families living through war, and characters forced to measure American ideals against American reality. In A Transcontinental Affair, she moves forward to 1870 and America's first transcontinental luxury train, but the questions feel familiar: who gets freedom, who gets to choose love, and what progress really costs.

Teaching mattered too. Daynard has taught writing at Harvard University, MIT, and Emerson College, and later taught at Newton South High School. She also spent seven years as fiction editor at Boston Review, which kept her close to the day to day business of reading, shaping, and judging stories.

Off the page, she likes pursuits that don't involve words.

She lives outside Boston with her family. She has written about a British husband, a cabin in Maine, and trips to the Yorkshire Dales, where they stay on a sheep farm she calls Sheeplandia. She is also a swing dancer, plays jazz clarinet, and has spoken fondly of the two English Springer spaniels that round out the household.