Jessie Ann Foley

About Jessie Ann Foley

Jessie Ann Foley is an author and high school English teacher based in Chicago. She attended Loyola University Chicago, where she also earned her MFA. She has taught high school English for many years, and her experience working with teenagers shapes the specificity and emotional honesty of her fiction.

Her debut novel, The Carnival at Bray (2014), won the Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize and was widely praised for its evocative period atmosphere — the story is set in 1993, at the peak of the grunge era — and its unsentimental treatment of first love and grief. It established Foley as a writer with a sharp ear for place and music, and a clear-eyed understanding of what it costs to grow up.

Her Work and Its World

Foley's fiction is rooted in the working-class, Catholic neighborhoods of Chicago's North Side. Her characters tend to be Irish-American or working-class Catholic, navigating communities where certain things are not spoken aloud and where the gap between the official story and the lived reality is a constant source of pressure. She draws on her own background — she grew up on the North Side and attended Catholic schools — with the combination of affection and clear sight that comes from knowing a place deeply.

Her subsequent novels — including Neighborhood Girls (2017) and Sorry for Your Loss (2020) — continued in the same vein: emotionally intelligent, socially precise YA fiction that takes seriously both the specific geography of its setting and the interior lives of its teenage characters.

Book Bans

The Carnival at Bray has been banned or challenged in 38 school districts across 9 states. Challenges most frequently cite sexual content, language, and the depiction of alcohol and drug use — content that is in keeping with the realistic, period-specific world the novel inhabits. Foley has spoken about these challenges in the context of her work as a teacher, noting that the teenagers she teaches are the same audience these books are written for, and that pretending their world is less complicated than it is does not serve them.