-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Nancy Jensen's bestselling novel The Sisters was selected by the Independent Booksellers Association as a #1 Indie Next Pick, and included by Kirkus Reviews on its list for Best Fiction of 2011. She has been awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. Her first book, Window: Stories and Essays, was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press in 2009. She teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University and shares her home with five rescued cats.
Nancy Jensen's website
This bio was last updated on 03/17/2025. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
BookBrowse: Where did the idea for In Our Midst come from? What made you decide to write about German individuals' experiences in America during WWII?
Nancy Jensen: When I was working on my first novel The Sisters, I briefly thought about weaving an experience of the anti-German hysteria of WWI into one of my characters' backstories, so I did a quick internet search to remind myself of what I thought I knew. One of the links that came up was for The Freedom of Information Times website (www.foitimes.com). As soon as I started reading it, I realized that the site was describing experiences from WW II–not WW I–and I was surprised, but when I realized that the main subject of the site was the internment of German-Americans in the United States, I was stunned. I'd never heard of this before. Ultimately I decided to go another way with my character in The Sisters, and I went on with writing the book, but this little nugget of information stayed in my mind.
Years later, when I started gravitating toward writing another novel with a focus on the WW II American home front, I remembered that website and looked it up again. The main characters for the new novel were very different at the beginning–early versions of ...
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
