About

Jennifer L. Hollis is a writer. Her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard Review, and other publications. Her poems have been published in Breakwater Review (finalist, Peseroff Prize in poetry), Atlanta Review, Entropy, Cagibi, Peatsmoke Journal, and others.

She is the author of Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage (Praeger) and a contributor to Religion and Healing in America (University of Oxford Press). She researched and prepared “How Faith Communities Facilitate Conversations Around End-of-Life Concerns,” an issue brief for The Pew Charitable Trusts, along with a series of Q&As with faith leaders.

For more than twenty years, she was a certified music-thanatologist, offering harp music and singing to patients at the end of life in Montana, Oregon, Chicago, and Boston. She was the co-founder and project director of Harps of Comfort, a program which provided provide live, remote music at no cost to patients with Covid-19 and other serious illness, those nearing the end of life, loved ones, and caregivers. She is the former president of the Accorda Music-Thanatology Institute and the Music-Thanatology Association International.

She has a degree in child development from Connecticut College and a master of divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where, in 2023, she was selected for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. Stories about her work have appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Boston Globe and several podcasts. She lives outside Boston with her family.