Jean Hastings Ardell's work has appeared in newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, Orange County Register, San Antonio Express-News, San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Seattle Times; in magazines, including Orange Coast, The Sporting News, and Westways; in literary journals, including Elysian Fields Quarterly and Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture; and in the anthologies Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball (Faber and Faber, 1994), Growing Up With Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), and The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 2003 - 2004 (McFarland, 2005).

Awards & Honors

Academia

Jean Hastings Ardell attended the University of California at Irvine, where she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1988. She later began graduate work at the University of Southern California, where she studied with authors Shana Alexander, Gay Talese, and Betty Friedan. She graduated from USC in 1995 with a Master of Professional Writing in Nonfiction.

As a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), she is an enthusiastic student of the game. Ms. Ardell has presented research papers at the Diamonds in the Desert International Baseball Conference, SABR regional and national conferences, the Nine Spring Training Conference, the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, and the Baseball Reliquary.

Ms. Ardell returned to her alma mater as an instructor, teaching the course, "Using Life Stories to Sell Nonfiction," at the University of California Extension at Irvine in 1996-7. She also organized the UC Extension at Irvine Creative Writing Conference in October 1998. She currently teaches an ongoing memoir class, "Writing the Truth of Your Life," for the Adult Education Department at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, California.