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Jeanette Mrozinski

Jeanette Mrozinski started working at age eight assembling promotional keychains on her family’s living room floor in the American Midwest. Since then, she’s worked as a stripper and government bureaucrat, bakery girl and communications director, factory laborer, yoga instructor, journalist – and a few dozen other gigs besides. An MFA candidate in Nonfiction at Washington University in St. Louis, she writes about labor, class, and our intrinsic self-worth. Her in-progress memoir on sex work and spiritual formation recounts her search for salvation in hotel rooms, churches, and other wrong places.

2025 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner) | ‘Eucharist’ by Jeanette Mrozinski

May 2025, no. 475 25 April 2025
Six hours, forty-six minutes.      The pharmacy counter at my neighborhood Walgreens opened at 9 am, a full hour later than the rest of the store. I should have known that. When I was sixteen, I worked behind a Walgreens pharmacy counter just like this one, deciphering physicians’ cryptic shorthand and counting pills and holding on the phone with insurance companies and ... (read more)