Welcome to Letters From Jean — my digital home as an author and storyteller. Here, you’ll find an evolving body of work: books, essays, reflections, updates, and letters from the in-between.
This site is also home to my indie imprint, Living Poetry Press.
— DEBUT BOOK —
NOBODY PREPARED ME FOR THIS: 4 DEADLY SINS
— DEBUT BOOK —
NOBODY PREPARED ME FOR THIS: 4 DEADLY SINS
— DEBUT BOOK — NOBODY PREPARED ME FOR THIS: 4 DEADLY SINS — DEBUT BOOK — NOBODY PREPARED ME FOR THIS: 4 DEADLY SINS
Jean John-Edo is a British-Nigerian writer of lyrical nonfiction, exploring queerness, faith, memory, and the strange beauty of survival. Her work blends personal narrative with cultural reflection, crafting essays and memoirs that feel both intimate and expansive.
She writes for those who live in the in-between — between continents, between identities, between loss and becoming. Whether addressing the silence of grief, the danger of visibility, or the rituals that hold us together, Jean’s voice is rooted in emotional honesty and poetic precision.
Her debut book, Nobody Prepared Me for This: 4 Deadly Sins, was published as submission for the 2025 Kindle Storyteller Award. Her forthcoming works include The Aisle (literary fiction) and the Lagos survival nonfiction There’s No More Rice at Home.
Jean lives between cities and worlds, but her home is in the sentence; and the stories we’re brave enough to tell.
Current Projects
Upcoming Projects
A story of defiance that reverberates across three decades, The Aisle is a powerful narrative anchored by a single, audacious act. In 2025, a queer daughter walks the center aisle of her father’s funeral Mass in his white agbada, even as the priest condemns LGBTQ+ people from the pulpit. That courageous walk alters three women’s lives: a suicidal boarding-school girl in the pews, a church elder nursing a buried love, and an aging nun haunted by decades of silence.
A work of unflinching nonfiction, There's No More Rice at Home unsparingly examines the politics of culture and endurance in Lagos, one of the world's most demanding cities. Blending personal memoir with social critique, the book explores the rituals and contradictions of everyday survival. It's a deep dive into the lives of people who must constantly negotiate with their environment, with each other, and with the systems they've inherited, all to simply stay afloat.