Jesse Lee Kercheval (born 1956) is an American poet, memoirist, translator, fiction writer and visual artist.

She is the author of numerous books, notably Building Fiction, The Museum of Happiness, Space and Underground Women, and she is a translator of Uruguayan poetry.

Kercheval's first novel is The Museum of Happiness, a story about a young widow and a half-Alsatian, half-German carnival worker falling in love in Paris in 1929.

"By turns hilarious and devastating, The Alice Stories form a tender and poetic chronicle of one woman's journey through time, love, motherhood, and Wisconsin.

It is a marvelous example of how connected stories can, even more effectively than a novel, evoke a life in all its ranging, episodic, and emotional complexity.

However, Brazil doesn't linger in Miami for long; instead it roams from Florida to Wisconsin in a shiny black BMW.

She then discovers that she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist.

[8] Kercheval has published translations from Spanish of the Uruguayan poets Circe Maia, Silvia Guerra, Mariella Nigro, Fabián Severo, Luis Bravo, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Javier Etchevarren, Tatiana Oroño and Idea Vilariño.

[10] During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Kercheval took up drawing because she “wanted to do something that wasn’t just sitting on the computer reading bad news all day”.

[11] Her drawings have been published as graphic narratives in literary magazines, notably Image,[12] New Letters (Editor’s Choice Award, Winter/Spring 2022)[13] and the New Ohio Review (winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest).