Jennifer Degenhardt
Author · Educator · Conversation Starter
Jennifer Degenhardt, B.A., M.Ed., has spent more than thirty years in classrooms — middle school, high school, and now university — watching students light up when a story finally speaks to their real life.
She started writing CI novels in 2014 because she needed something her students could actually read — and because the books that existed weren't saying anything worth saying.
She didn't publish until 2016. Her students made her. Literally. When she mentioned she was writing characters who were gay, they wouldn't let her keep it to herself.
So she wrote about racism. About immigration. About coming out in a family that wasn't ready. About being undocumented. About having a parent in prison. About suicidal ideation. About the federal government's abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. About Argentina's Dirty War. About being trans. About microaggressions dressed up as small talk in a white suburban town.
In accessible, comprehensible language. For language learners.
Nobody else was doing it. She did it anyway.
And she did it differently from the start. Her French stories are set in Guadeloupe, Haiti, the Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — not France. Her Spanish stories are set in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Because language and culture are inextricably linked — and students deserve to meet the whole world, not just the colonizing nation.
Today her catalog spans more than 100 titles in Spanish, French, English, German and Italian — organized by proficiency level for curriculum planning, and tagged by the real topics they tackle: incarceration, DACA, domestic violence, trans identity, substance abuse, racism, suicidal ideation, disability.
That's where the real conversation starts.
"I write to promote discussion. I get so tired of theory and expertise and would rather humans discuss what's really happening — to decrease stigma and have people become more open to the fact that everyone has something and that no one is perfect."
