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Lori Jakiela is the author of seven books, including the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize from Stanford University.

She received an honorable mention in the 2018 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and her work has been published in The New York Times (Modern Love), The Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. She writes a regular column, “Let Yourself Go” — hugely influenced by the late, great Erma Bombeck — for Pittsburgh Magazine.

A former international flight attendant, Jakiela directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg; teaches creative writing in the doctoral program at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary; and leads many community workshops. For four years, she co-directed the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival at Chautauqua Institution.

She was a co-founder of Veterans Write, a program that offered free writing workshops to veterans and their families.