About Jill

Jill Gleeson is an independent journalist who specializes in travel, adventure and serious, no-holds-barred high jinks. Jill believes that bashing in boundaries and bouncing outside of comfort zones can yield big-time rewards and she’s eager to enlist you in the expedition.

Jill’s path to journalism was unconventional. After ditching Penn State 11 credits shy of a theatre performance degree, the one-time University Scholar hit the Chicago stage scene with rabid enthusiasm. Turning her nose up at mainstream theatre companies, she starred in underground cult hits like Stage Blood and Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack, in which she played the ravenous, rock-smoking pep-squad leader Buffy.

In 1994, Jill bid adieu to Chicago − and theatre − setting her sights on infiltrating radio’s airwaves. From Charleston, South Carolina to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, she nightly brought the gospel of alternative rock to the masses, bewitching her audience with antics outrageous, including live broadcasts from sex shops and scandalous interviews with bands as disparate as L7, The Flaming Lips and the Goo Goo Dolls.

But the rolling mountains of Central Pennsylvania never ceased their siren call, and just a few months short of the new millennium Jill returned to State College, the town where she was raised. Ever ready for new challenges and fresh thrills, she dove headfirst into journalism’s perfidious waters.

Soon she was writing for Washingtonian, Harrisburg Magazine and other well-respected publications throughout the mid-Atlantic, profiling national politicians, Olympic athletes, best-selling novelists and Hollywood movers and shakers. But it was not until the opportunity to pen a travel feature arose that Jill found her true passion: throwing caution to the wind and bringing you along for the ride.

Whitewater rafting West Virginia’s New River; dabbling in Scottish falconry; elephant riding and tiger-petting in Thailand; driving a stock car 150 miles an hour around the Pocono Raceway − there is nothing Jill won’t try and nowhere she won’t go. Although her adventures often turn into misadventures, this metaphorical love child of Lucille Ball and Nelly Bly knows that no matter how absurd or calamitous the journey, getting there is always at least half the fun.