A Bit About Me

I’m Cinnamon Janzer, a freelance writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I’ve always found reality to be significantly stranger than fiction. I’m enchanted by place and fascinated by humans and culture—how we survive, thrive and move through this world individually and collectively.

I publish my place-based, solutions-focused journalism work with outlets like National Geographic, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Food & Wine, The Washington Post and many more. I also moonlight as a marcoms writer and strategist who helps clients shape and share their best narratives. I speak English and Spanish and am always open to assignments and new clients.

With a focus on ceramics, photography and cultural anthropology, I graduated from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with a B.A. in Art. Some years later I earned an M.A. in Social Design from Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art. My pioneering critique of the practice of social design and accompanying solutions framework has been published in the journal Design and Culture as well as the books Developing Citizen Designers and The Social Design Reader.

I lived around the country and the world, from Nicaragua to New York City, before making Minneapolis (the best American city in my opinion) home. Between my first job at a buffet at age 15 and trading traditional work for the freedom of self-employment in 2015, I led communications at a tech start up in Las Vegas and worked in behavioral economics consulting at a nonprofit.

My freelance career has included serving as the editor of Impact Design Hub (R.I.P.), a digital publication that produced leading coverage of design’s social impact. For many years I was also a strategist and senior copywriter on a very lovely creative team at McCann Global Health. Today I work with Empowerment Avenue to help incarcerated writers publish stories from prison and mentor aspiring journalists through the Solutions Journalism Network. My work has been supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

That said, I generally find professional life to be wildly inequitable and antithetical to a meaningful life. I spend as much time as possible surfing in México, enjoying good food and creative cocktails around the Twin Cities and tending to the prairie that encircles the home I share with my darling husband, our convivial collie mix, and a cat who answers to neither of her two names.