Jessica Willingham is a fiction graduate of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project (2019–2021) in Denver, Colorado. She has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology (2023, 2024), appeared on the longlist for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions (2024), and received a nomination for Best Microfiction (2025). She is a 2026 Woody Guthrie Poet, and 2026 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence in poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Catfish Belly, was named a semi-finalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming by Belle Point Press.

Her work appears in Hell is Real: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, Identity Theory, Roi Faineant Press, Still: The Journal, Mississippi Review, and Variant Literature, among others.

She is the former art director and editor of The Weekly at Five South, and current associate editor at L’Esprit Literary Review and Indirect Books. She serves as a submission reader for Bicoastal Review, Fractured Literary, and The Masters Review.

She lives in Oklahoma.