About

Nominated for Best American Essay 2024 and the Pushcart Prize 2024

A freelance career in media is fairly long if it lasts a heartbeat. I mean a week. Beyond probability, mine lasted thirty years. It had to. I was a single mom—making headlines and deadlines all over the world.

Judith Hannah Weiss

One moment, I was writing so Martha would sound like Martha, Oprah would sound like Oprah, Elmo like Elmo, Elle like Elle, Rolling Stone like Rolling Stone and History like History. The next moment, that was history, and I was using every neuron to place pegs in a board.

I got a new life with a mind of its own and never got another paycheck, never did another job. My last career move was refunding a fat five-figure advance to a broadcast behemoth known across the globe.

I moved—or rather, was moved—to a rambling farmhouse overrun with tangled brush. It is called Avalon, which means Paradise. It’s not. It was nine hours south of my life and my child. No trace of the move remains in my mind.

Evidently, I reconfigured any shards of anything I ever knew, then start scratching scraps of anything I recalled on any surface I could find. Napkins, paper cups, coffee stirrers, Popsicle sticks. I stashed these in brown paper shopping bags, then forgot the shopping bags.

I also made small collages, then built small homes for birds, and painted small carved birds with translucent colors and tiny flecks of gold. This becomes J. Hannah Art for Humans and Homes for Birds, sold in select galleries. Each piece is one of a kind. Meanwhile, scraps extracted from shopping bags became We Used to Be Me, An Amnesic Memoir. 

The homes are built with salvaged wood. The book is built with salvaged words.

My post-truck work has appeared on NBC News and in The Washington Post, The Oldster, Salmagundi, Iowa Review, Intima Narrative Medicine Journal of Columbia University, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Memoir Monday, Longreads (Editor's Pick), and HuffPost .

In 2024, I was nominated for Best American Essay and for The Pushcart Prize. In addition, I have been a finalist for The Iowa Review’s Nonfiction Book Prize, winner of the 44th and 45th New Millennium Writing Awards,  a Longreads Editor's Pick and chosen for inclusion in the book Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay, by Nancy Slonim Aronie .  I  now live in Charlottesville, VA, where I make art for humans and homes for birds. You can also find me at judithhannahweiss.substack.com.

One of the birds I paint by hand.