Books • Editing • Podcasting• Journalism • Social Video • Audience Strategy • Content Direction • Events

Jess Zafarris chronically writes and creates content about words, social media, marketing, book publishing, advertising, and communications.

She is the author of several books on word origins, including Once Upon a Word (Rockridge Press, 2020), Words from Hell (Chambers, 2023), and Useless Etymology (Chambers, 2025), the first two of which have sold more than 30,000 copies. 

Jess has built a devoted following of more than 96,000 TikTok users (@jesszafarris) who tune in to hear her talk about etymology. She also co-hosts the podcast Words Unravelled, which draws around 25,000 daily views and listens across YouTube podcast platforms. Her blog, UselessEtymology.com, has been educating curious word lovers for more than a decade.

She serves as an adjunct professor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College.

She is an Editor-at-Large for Ragan Communications and PR Daily, where she regularly writes online content about words, word origins, social media, and communications. She speaks annually at Writer’s Digest’s Annual Conference, teaches writing-centric courses for a range of universities and online platforms, and has developed word-origin video content for Dictionary.com.

She and her work have been quoted, featured, and mentioned in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and Harper’s Magazine, and she has appeared on BBC World Service Radio and Boston Public Radio. She’s also been a guest on podcasts including Dear Hank & John and The Grammar Girl Podcast, discussing topics from etymology to content strategy.

Jess has more than 13 years of experience in digital media, having served as a content, editorial, and audience director at organizations including Writer’s Digest, Adweek, and Ragan Communications. She has ghostwritten thought leadership pieces for advertising industry executives that have appeared in Fast Company and The New York Times.

Tickled by the validation of sharing her knowledge to the mostly interested public, she also helps other people do so, and as a result she has programmed and hosted tracks and moderated keynote firesides at events including Brandweek, Social Media Week, Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference, and PR Daily’s Social Media Conference.

She even dabbles in fiction, having written a sweary scary horror story on then-Twitter one time that blew up and turned into an eBook published by Hachette.

If you would like Jess to do, write, or say a thing, she’s always looking for more things to do, write, and say. She is still learning how to pronounce the words “no, thank you, I don’t have time for that,” so if you ask, she will probably say “yes.”

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