Jennifer Lee Noonan was born in Austin, Texas, where she embraced writing at a young age as part of a larger need to perform, entertain, and generally be paid attention to. Most of her early work consisted of vaudeville-style shows with her friends, mockumentaries with her friends’ parents’ video cameras, and short horror stories which she imagined were in the style of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. (They were not.)
Shortly after her 21st birthday, she graduated from the University of Texas with two Bachelor’s degrees: the first in Radio-Television-Film, and the second in Plan II Honors, a bizarrely-named but distinguished liberal arts program promising “an Ivy League education for kids who can’t afford an Ivy League school.” At that point, her somewhat manic work history (starting at Domino’s Pizza at the age of 15, and overlapping to various degrees with a café, a music studio, a telemarketing agency, a construction company, and the technical support division of a pawn shop franchise) finally condensed into a single full-time position as a video game sound designer. Jennifer spent the next five years earning both sound design and voiceacting credits on titles like Turok: Evolution, All-Star Baseball, and Area 51.
In 2016, she published her first book, No Map to This Country, about her experiences raising autistic children. Shortly afterward, she joined the narrative nonfiction website DamnInteresting.com, where, in addition to contributing articles, she began narrating their regular podcast. In 2019, she and a group of co-hosts spun off an unscripted weekly version of the podcast, Damn Interesting Week, which has released over 200 episodes to date. In 2020, she partnered with legendary video game designer Sid Meier to write the aptly-titled Sid Meier’s Memoir!, and won a Sidney Award from the New York Times for her Damn Interesting article “Dupes and Duplicity.”
Since 2021, she has co-owned and operated a summer camp called Game Worlds that teaches video game development to kids. She has been married to her husband Andrew since 2003, and her latest book project is currently in development.
