Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeannée Sacken

Hi Jeannée, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

I tell stories. I write them. I photograph them.

My own story began with Barbie. When I was five, I made up epic stories that my best friend and I acted out with our dolls. I also created adventure stories for the neighborhood kids to enact in the nearby woods. At about the same time, I received my first camera and composed visual stories. In third grade, the teacher assigned us to write a story about something we knew. I wrote a story about a young shepherd in the desert. Go figure! All the other students handed in a paragraph, but I handed in a stack of ten pages. The next day, the teacher read my story to the class and said: “Boys and girls. You are looking at a future author.” I believed her. For years I wrote stories, publishing them in my schools’ literary journals and I thought of myself as an author.

Until I got to graduate school. Pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature left me no time to do more than read other authors’ novels. Later, as an English professor, all my energy went into lesson preps, reading my students’ work, and publishing literary criticism. No complaints. I loved my students, and I loved identifying as an academic.

Slowly, though, I came to miss my creative self, bought a camera, and asked a colleague in the College of Photography to mentor me. Call it an early mid-life crisis, but when a friend invited me on a photoshoot in Zimbabwe, I jumped at the chance. And fell in love.

Fast forward a few years. When I finally resigned my tenure to pursue a career as a photojournalist, I merged the two media to document the lives of women and children in countries around the world. At gallery shows, I placed their stories next to their portraits. So many viewers begged me to expand on the stories, and that gave rise to my writing my own novels. The award-winning Annie Hawkins Series features a photojournalist on assignment in Afghanistan who is committed to furthering the education of girls. My forthcoming suspense novel, The Women Who Stand Between, tells the story of a cinematographer blacklisted by Hollywood who fights to regain her position by making a film about a fierce, all-female anti-poaching unit in Zimbabwe.

Like my photographs, my novels focus on issues of social justice: education for girls and the conservation of endangered species. My stories are set in other countries—Afghanistan, Zimbabwe. The teacher side of me wants to expose my readers to cultures that are new to them. A portion of the sale of my photographs and my novels goes to support the education of children and adults in countries where going to school is considered a luxury and not a given.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

Leaving academia wasn’t easy. Even though I made the decision to move on, I discovered how deeply ingrained teaching was in my soul. The first September when classes started without me, I felt empty, as if my life had lost its purpose. Years later, Septembers are still hard, so I try to schedule a photoshoot or a book launch. I have, though, reached the point where I identify as a photojournalist and an author.

Given that most of my photoshoots are in other countries, photographing people or wildlife or cultural events, I have to travel. Which I love. Flying, though, is something else. I am not a good flyer; in fact, my fear has been paralyzing at some points in my life. SOAR (Dr. Tom Bunn’s system of exercises that allows me to control my anxiety) has helped me enormously. I still don’t like to fly, but I climb aboard aircraft from 777s to four-seater Cessnas and soar over African savannahs, Mongolian mountains, Laotian jungles, and massive oceans. Whatever I have to do to get the shot.

Whenever I go on a photoshoot, I research the culture and the people and the animals I’ll be seeing. I learn enough of the language to have a very basic conversation. I strive to be an appreciative and respectful visitor to the people who are opening their homes and their lives to me.

Similarly, when I wrote The Annie Hawkins Series and The Women Who Stand Between, I did a lot—and I mean a lot—of primary and secondary research—a definite challenge. It’s also been critical to have cultural sensitivity readers vet my work. There are no shortcuts. I want my novels to feel authentic. I want my readers to feel that they’re in-country.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?

I’ve written the award-winning suspenseful Women’s Fiction Annie Hawkins Series. Behind the Lens won the Hawthorne Prize and Novel of the Year (American Writing Awards), among many other awards. Double Exposure won Firebird Awards for Best Suspense and Best Women’s Fiction. The Rule of Thirds was named Literary Global Awards Book of the Year; Best Multicultural Fiction; Best Thriller & Adventure; 2023 Best Women’s Fiction, American Writing Awards; 2024 Bookfest Best Literary Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Best Thriller-Suspense, Best Women’s Fiction Thriller & Suspense; 2024 Firebird Awards Best Suspense, Best Multicultural Fiction.

The Women Who Stand Between, suspenseful Women’s Fiction, is forthcoming in fall, 2025.

Upcoming photographic shows include Milwaukee’s Gallery Night and Day in January 2025.

Who else deserves credit in your story?

I write about the real world and that has included the courageous women and girls in Afghanistan who have risked their lives time and again to get an education, journalists who put their lives on the line to tell the stories of what’s been happening in war zones, and the fierce, anti-poaching units in southern Africa who stand between endangered species and extinction.

Numerous sensitivity readers have vetted my novels, including Heba Elkobaitry and Hannah Tranter.

Most important, are the readers who keep returning to my novels and tell their friends.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jeanneesacken.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorjeanneesacken/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeanneesacken