Author: Jeanie Kortum

Jeanie Kortum is an author, journalist, and humanitarian. In partnership with the National Park System, she founded and directed A Home Away from Homelessness for nearly 20 years. Her philanthropic work has been widely recognized by a long list of awards, some of which include the San Francisco Foundation’s Community Award, the Commission on Women Making History Award, the Jefferson Award, the Espiritu Award from the Isabel Allende Foundation, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Urban Research Association, Indie Book Awards Grand Prize Second Place winner — Fiction and General Fiction/Novel (Over 80,000 words) winner in 2018 and Million Writers Award from Narrative Magazine Spring 2008 Issue. Her award-winning first novel, Ghost Vision, is loosely based on her experiences dogsledding to a Greenland village at the top of the world. She researched Stones, her second novel, by living with a hunter/gatherer tribe in Africa, during which time she witnessed a clitoridectomy. This experience compelled her to bring awareness to the danger of female genital mutilation (FGM). Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, has stated: “Not since Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy has a novel so boldly placed female genital mutilation at its heart . . . Stones is as rewarding as it is provocative.” Her journalistic work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative Magazine, the San Francisco Review of Books and Borderless Magazine. She has presented at the University of Oxford, has been the subject of two CBS national news profiles, and rights to her life story have been sold to Warner Brothers.