Jen Stock

An award-winning essayist and Lecturer in Writing at Yale, Jen has spent two decades helping students become curious, independent readers and confident writers. Among the first tutors at one of New York’s leading tutoring firms, she has built a career not only transforming students’ skills while broadening their intellectual enthusiasms, but imparting her gift for humanities teaching in mentoring new tutors and shaping teaching approaches at the company level.

At Yale, Jen teaches essay and creative writing in both seminars and one-on-one tutorials in some of the college’s most well-known and rigorous writing courses. As a Residential College Writing Tutor, she also coached undergraduates across every department, guiding them from a first idea to a finished draft. That breadth has given her a nuanced understanding of what strong writing looks like in every discipline, and how to help students get there.

Jen’s own path to writing ran through music. After double majoring in Music and English at Yale, she earned a PhD in Music Composition from the CUNY Graduate Center and spent a decade composing and performing electroacoustic music in New York before turning to literary nonfiction. Her essays have since appeared in The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, among others. Three have been named Notable in The Best American Essays, and her recently completed collection was a finalist for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize.

As a tutor, Jen loves to demystify academic writing—helping students break up complex writing assignments into manageable stages, sharpen their arguments, and develop clear, authentic voices of their own. She’s drawn to close, sentence-level work, and she loves helping young writers see, and then control, a broader range of syntactical and rhetorical choices, giving them greater authority and expressive range on the page. In her sessions, Jen shares her love of language and “word work,” and delights in seeing students grow not only as writers but as thinkers.