ABOUT
Jay Jennings is an award-winning screenwriter, author, and editor.
His screenplay A Treacherous Country, adapted from the novel by K.M. Kruimink, won the 2025 Byron Bay (Australia) International Film Festival’s screenplay competition. His screenplay based on Charles Portis’s novel The Dog of the South (co-written with Graham Gordy) is currently in development.
Jennings’s book Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City, about the Little Rock (Ark.) Central High School football team fifty years after the 1957 integration crisis, was reissued in 2023 by the University of Arkansas Press. It will be available as an audiobook in 2026. The Wall Street Journal’s review said the book “transcends the season-on-the-brink genre.”
His editing projects have included Charles Portis: Collected Works, published in April 2023 by the Library of America. It contains the novels and much, but not all, other writing that he assembled in 2012 for Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. That collection was named Book of the Year for 2012 by Books & Culture, and the New York Times Book Review called it “a thoughtfully composed selection of published work spiced with rare and fresh material.” He has often spoken about True Grit and Charles Portis under the NEA’s Big Read program.
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In 2023, he won the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, given to an Arkansas writer for contribution to the literature of the state. As a reporter and critic, he has published in many national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and Oxford American, where he was an editor from 2015 to 2021.​
Jay Jennings speaks at the Clinton School on Carry the Rock.