Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award (General Fiction). Jenny Shank's novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Book Awards, was a Tattered Cover Book Store Summer Reading selection, and was the featured book in the Wheat Ridge Reads community reading program.

Jenny's stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust Magazine, The Guardian, Santa Monica Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, Barrelhouse, The Toast, and The Rumpus. Her fiction, nonfiction, and satire have been anthologized in The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals, Dear McSweeney's: Two Decades of Letters to the Editor from Writers, Readers, and the Occasional Bewildered Consumer, and Love in the Time of Time's Up: A Short Fiction Anthology.

One of her stories was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in Best American Essays and another received Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize anthology. She has won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Society of Professional Journalists, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Jenny has published over a thousand book reviews and author interviews in places such as Dallas Morning News, High Country News, PBS MediaShift, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and America magazine. Jenny was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club for six years, and for four years she was the Books & Writers Editor of New West, which was named "Best Literary Blog" in the Westword Best of Denver issue. She was a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California. She is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver, and she lives in Boulder with her husband, daughter, and son.