Noelle Q de Jesus

Noelle Q. de Jesus is a fiction writer with an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University, an occasional poet and a literary translator (Filipino/Tagalog to English). Born in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up and came of age in Manila, Philippines, and has lived most of her adult life in Singapore, where she and her husband raised their daughter and son. Trained as an advertising copywriter at McCann-Erickson Philippines, she helped establish the first Southeast Asian franchise of Cosmopolitan Philippines in 1997 as its Associate Editor. What followed was a 15-year career as a special projects editor in women's magazines including Female, Seventeen Singapore, Elle Singapore, among others. She continues to do freelance copywriting projects while writing fiction and sometimes poetry on the side. Her first short story collection, Blood Collected Stories (Ethos Books Singapore) won the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Award for the Short Story and was translated by the poet Patricia Houeffa Grange into French and published as Passeportv by Editions Do in 2020. Her second book of short fiction, Cursed and Other Stories came out in 2019 as part of the premiere list of Penguin Random House Southeast Asia. In 2023, she published her English translation of renowned Filipino screenwriter Ricky Lee's first novel, For B (or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us). She is also the author of a children's book, A Summer Day Of Nothing But Everything, and a contemporary chicklit novel, Mrs MisMarriage. In the fall of 2023, Noelle was a Fellow at the University of Iowa International Writers Program, representing Singapore and the Philippines. Her fiction has been anthologized in the region and appeared in literary journals including Witness, Puerto del Sol, Mud Season Review, New LImestone Review, and Fiction Attic Press, among others. She is currently completing her first literary novel.