About - Janell Strube

Meet Janell

Novelist. Memoirist. Poet. Explorer.

Janell Strube makes a mean barbecue sauce. She’s also a world traveler, a baker, and a bicyclist. But when she writes, her identity as an adoptee often steers her attention to topics of alienation, erased history, and displacement.

In 2024, a personal essay of hers was published in the anthology Adoption and Suicidality. Her work has also appeared in Shaking the Tree: brazen. short. memoir and A Year in Ink. Her short memoir, “Taking my Blonde Daughter to a Black Lives Matter Rally,” was selected for the 2020 San Diego Memoir Showcase, an annual live storytelling event.

While much of her writing is personal, she enjoys the freedom that comes with crafting fiction. Her desire to learn about forgotten female artists who shaped the French revolutionary period motivated her to write Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution.

When not crunching numbers as a tax executive for a hotel chain, she can be found hanging out with Shiloh the Wheaten and plotting her second book.

Explorer

As I travel the world I look for connections with the past. When I read the words of an ancient philosopher, peruse a scene cut into a tile floor thrusting up through powdery lava ash on a faraway island, discover an ordinary house spigot on a three-thousand-year-old wine carafe, it feels as though the thoughts and feelings of the one who wrote the word, created the art, fashioned the tool, are coming to me like lights on a string hung across the universe. Lit up, they pass their energy and thought through me into the present and into the future. I see that we are one, striving, and struggling—our stories cradled in that golden light that carries forward.

Join me on Substack

Janell posts poetry, blogs, travel stories, and original recipes on her Substack account. Get on her list.