Jennifer Charles (born Jennifer Asher Zipken; November 15, 1968) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, writer, and actor. Along with Oren Bloedow, she co-founded the New York band Elysian Fields. Her work is known for its emotional intensity, with her writing exploring nature, love, loss, death, myth, and identity, often with philosophical and literary influences. She has a contralto voice. Early life Jennifer was the first born child of Peter Charles (né Zipken) and Jeri Charles (née Valentine). She has a younger brother, Joshua. When Jennifer was an infant, her father had her birth name (and that of the whole family) changed from Zipken to Charles, which had been his professional name for years on the radio as a disc jockey, and which he had decided to change legally once his own father died. Charles is of Russian Jewish and Irish descent, and grew up in a mostly secular Jewish household. Her parents separated when she was four, and Jennifer and her brother were raised by their mother, seeing her father every two weeks. She grew up in houses filled with music, because her mother had been a classical music programmer at WMAL-FM, and because her father had been a late night jazz DJ at WAVZ out of New Haven, CT. Her mother also used to be a torch singer in Washington clubs, so Jennifer also learned early on the songs of Édith Piaf, Ruth Etting, Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland. And from her grandmother, she absorbed most of the Tin Pan Alley and blues songs of the 1920s and 1930s. The music of popular AM radio at the time of her childhood was multiform, and Jennifer fell asleep with a transistor radio most nights. The homes Jennifer grew up in with her mother in Washington, D.C. were unconventional, and she was exposed to many cultures as her mother and her mother's good friend (another single mother) formed something of a group house, taking in writers and filmmakers (Stephen Jimenez and Henry Jaglom among them), and a French chef as boarders. As young children, she and her brothers would travel door to door, performing a kind of children's vaudeville act, singing Tin Pan Alley songs and tap dancing. Jennifer was a shy girl, so when she started doing children's theater at age 10, her stage debut at Trinity Theater was that of a cat who had no speaking