Jan C. Maher (b. 1946) is an American writer and educational consultant. She has written numerous plays and books including Most Dangerous Women (2006, 2015, 2017) and two novels, Heaven, Indiana (2000) and Earth As It Is (2017). She is a featured contributor in the fiction anthology A Contract of Words, and has several short stories and poems in online and print journals including Meat for Tea: The Valley Review and Straw Dog Poetry Anthology: Compass Roads: A dispatch from Paradise/Poems about the Pioneer Valley .

Her first collection of short stories, The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories, will be released on Feb. 19, 2020.

She attended Shimer College, and earned degrees from The New School, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and The Union Institute and University. She is co-founder and director of Local Access, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create educational opportunities in and through the arts, and is a senior scholar at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

She lives in Greenfield, MA.