Jan Parr

Jan Parr has been creating quality content for magazines and the web for more than 30 years.

A longtime editor at Chicago magazine, she became a specialist in start-ups, founding three magazines for the city brand: Chicago Home + Garden, Chicago Shops, and Chicago Visitor. Parr created Chicago magazine’s first online blog, Design Dose. She also founded Online Investor magazine, a consumer publication; Dividends, a custom publication for Staples small-business customers; and was on the start-up team for Connect-Time, a magazine newspaper insert instructing readers about what was then the fledgling world of the internet.

Parr was a reporter for Forbes in its Chicago bureau and news editor of Crain’s Electronic Media. As editor of Online Investor, she spoke at investing conferences and conducted podcast interviews. She spoke at numerous events as editor of Chicago Home + Garden.

Parr taught graduate and undergraduate magazine editing at Medill from 2000 to 2015 before her duties as assistant managing editor at Crain’s Chicago Business forced her to stop teaching. Parr was an editor at Crain’s for 12 years and continues to be a contributor.

She is the author of three books, including Chicago Spaces: Inspiring Interiors, as well as two titles for young adults: The Young Vegetarian’s Companion and Amelia Earhart: First Lady of Flight. Her byline has appeared in many national and local publications.

Parr earned a bachelor’s of journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia, spent a year at the London School of Economics as a Rotary scholar, and earned a Master of Arts in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.