Black and White Photo of Jen taken in front of the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the National Museum of the American Indian on Piscataway lands (Washington, D.C.). Jen is slightly angled looking away from the camera. Jen is wearing a medicine pouch, black glasses, hir hair pulled back, a light pink shawl around hir shoulders with a burgundy, white, and black print dress, and large gold hoop earrings and bangles. Behind hir is is a collage of photos from various events and photoshoots.
Jen Deerinwater is a bisexual, Two-Spirit, multiply-disabled, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an award-winning journalist and organizer who covers the myriad of issues hir communities face with an intersectional lens. Jen is the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism, an Indigenous storytelling, arts, and media non-profit organization in the so-called US. Jen has been awarded several fellowships, including the 2019 New Economies Reporting Project Fellowship, 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship, and the 2024 Disability Visibility fellowship at the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy.
Jen received a B.A. from the University of Southern California in Gender Studies and Political Science with an emphasis on American Federal Government, a Graduate Certificate in Women in Politics and Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and a M.S. in Communications Management from Simmons College.
Jen is a contributor to Truthout and hir work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Eater, Rewire.News, and In These Times. Jen’s writing is included in the anthologies Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty First Century, We Organize to Change Everything: Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice, Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. Jen is also hard at work on two books, including a 2SLGTBTQIA+ multi-faith anthology, Sacred and Subversive: Queer Voices on Faith and Spirituality, under contract with Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Jen has been interviewed for numerous outlets on hir work and The Advocate named Jen a 2019 Champion of Pride. Jen is also a 2022 member of the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame.
Jen has served on numerous boards and councils throughout the years including the Ending the HIV Epidemic among Urban Natives Community Advisory Board with Johns Hopkins University and Native American Lifelines. Jen is a current member of the board of directors for the Disabled Journalist Association and a Senior Advisor for the Disability Culture Lab.
While a nomad at heart and raised in rural areas of hir nation’s reservation in Oklahoma and in rural Texas, Jen currently lives on Piscataway land known as Washington, D.C.