About

I’m a journalist and a historian-in-training.

My reporting focuses on science and the environment—particularly how humans have made sense of the world and our place in it and left our fingerprints all over its surface. I’ve covered archaeology, paleontology, and more, but I especially love reporting on ecology and trash. My first book, SEWER, about the science of underground warrens of waste, is out now from Bloomsbury. I’m currently at work on a book for Random House focusing on fossils of the Anthropocene and how we have changed the surface of this planet and others.

Before this, I was a senior editor and staff writer at Atlas Obscura. Before that, I was an editor at The Atlantic’s urbanism project CityLab, where I launched and managed the environment channel. I’ve written articles and essays for The Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, NPR, and more, and my work has been republished by Wired, Grist, Mother Jones, the Seattle Times, and the dearly departed Pacific Standard. My reporting has been cited by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Smithsonian Magazine, Vox, and other outlets. I received my MFA in creative writing from Hunter College, and my initial reporting training at the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.

In addition to my reporting work, I am a PhD student in history at Johns Hopkins University, where I am also a Hugh Hawkins fellow and a fellow in the Death x Data Lab, part of the LifexCode project. My research focuses on dissection and the afterlives of grave-robbed human remains and medical museum specimens in the Northeastern United States from the 19th century to the present, and is informed by public history and community work and internships in museum education and curatorial departments.

I have recently held fellowships at Drexel University and the Marine Biological Laboratory. My work received the 2024 Shryock medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. Raised in metro Detroit and rural Ontario, Canada, I now live on Cape Cod.

For literary projects, I'm represented by Monika Woods at Triangle House. To discuss journalism assignments, you can reach me at jessicaleighhester.work[at] gmail dot com or on Twitter @jessicahester. For academic chats, please contact jhester6 [at] jhmi dot edu.