A Bit About Me

I’m Cinnamon Janzer, a freelance writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I find 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, and how a better future can be built.

I publish my place-based, solutions-focused journalism with outlets like National Geographic, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Food & Wine, The Washington Post and many more. I have been a contributing writer to Next City, one of the top five solutions journalism newsrooms in the country, since 2018. I 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 and cultural anthropology, I graduated from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with a BA in Art. Some years later I got an MA in Social Design from Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art. Versions of my thesis work—a co-authored critique of the social application of design thinking and an accompanying solutions framework—have been published in the journal Design and Culture as well as the books Developing Citizen Designers and The Social Design Reader. My academic work and background in systems-level social change represents the foundation of my thinking on sociocultural systems, theories of change and the power structures through which they manifest.

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

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 supported a very lovely, end-to-end creative team at McCann Global Health as a senior strategist and copywriter. Today I work on marcoms projects with a range of clients, namely philanthropic foundations. I also work with Empowerment Avenue to edit and help publish incarcerated writers and mentor emerging journalists through the Solutions Journalism Network. My journalism has been supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

That said, I find wage labor, career and insufficiently regulated market economy capitalism 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 tallgrass prairie that encircles the cozy home I share with my darling husband, our convivial collie mix and a feisty cat who refuses to lose weight or answer to either of her two names.