Jack Aaron Harrell (born November 23, 1961) is an American fiction writer, essayist, and English professor at Brigham Young University–Idaho.
After high school, he moved to Vernal, Utah, where he was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While studying at Brigham Young University in 1990, Harrell wrote his first short story, “A Sense of Order.” He began to write his novel Vernal Promises in a fiction class at Brigham Young University and won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award in 2000 for the unpublished manuscript.
[4] In addition to his writing, Harrell served for five years as co-editor for Irreantum, the publication of the Association for Mormon Letters.
Harrell's writing often addresses the challenges of being a writer and a believer, of juxtaposing aesthetics with the constraints of institutional religion.