About the Author


Photo by Michelle Fielden Photographs

Subscribing to the notion that we’re all more alike than different, Jean Ellen Whatley feels privileged in her self-appointed role of cockeyed purveyor of our human condition. She’s both perceptive and profuse, sometimes profound, rarely punctual and given to alliteration.

Jean Ellen Whatley is an Emmy Award-winning journalist cum author who’s been published on Salon.com, More.com, SheWrites.com and, at the low ebb of her writing career, as the Bedding Columnist for Furniture Retailer Magazine.

Jean has been a guest columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Winston-Salem Journal  and the Albuquerque Tribune and has been featured as guest host on “The Evening Special” on KMOX (CBS) radio in St. Louis.

Jean’s broadcast career spans nearly twenty years and several diverse regions of the country. She has been a news reporter and anchor in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Winston-Salem/Greensboro, North Carolina; and St. Louis, MO. Her reporting has been featured on CNN and ABC.

Bridging the gap between reporting news and wrangling reporters, Jean has also served as Press Secretary to a New Mexico Attorney General, a Governor of Missouri and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Excerpts from her popular blog, A Woman With a Past: The Post-Apocalyptic Approach to Men, earned “Editor’s Picks” on Open Salon and high praise from many people who are not even members of her family.

Jean’s the proud parent of four, remarkably well-adjusted, mostly-grown kids and two high-maintenance mutts who reside with her in St. Louis, the dogs, that is. In her spare time, she deletes names of former boyfriends from her cell phone and composes pithy six-word memoirs in her head.

“It was all material. Some good.”