Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx-American writer, movement-builder, and performer who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. They are the author of Nervous:Essays on Heritage and Healing, which won the 2024 Memoir Prize and was featured by GLAMOUR, TIME, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. They are also co-editor of the anthology Closer to Liberation: Pina/xy Activism in Theory and Practice. Jen is a nationally recognized leader in the field of strategic communications and narrative power. They are a co-founder and board chair of ReFrame, and helped build the organization that became Media Justice, together with Amy Sonnie and Founding Director Malkia Devich Cyril. Jen is also a co-creator of the Weathering the Storms crisis prevention and response program of RoadMap, and developed the integrated communications framework, a movement-based model of applying communications toward leadership development, organizational capacity-building, and grassroots power-building, rather than a marketing-based model of downstream promotions and PR. As principal of Lionswrite Communications, Jen has strengthened the narrative capacity and impact of social justice groups from the local to international level. Years after the 2008 financial crisis, she worked with the Right to the City Alliance, the Center for Story-Based Strategy, Rainforest Action Network and other groups to help reignite national coverage of the ongoing foreclosure crisis and its impacts on families of color. Working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the We Belong Together campaign, Jen helped shift the 2013-2014 immigration narrative away from individual workers easy to isolate and criminalize, toward women and families who are part of transnational communities. Jen also helped ignite national debate around climate justice, led by BIPOC voices from the US and the Global South, while working with the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen has spent the past decade living with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea
