Jen Bryerton

Jennifer Bryerton is the co-founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of CharlottesvilleFamily, which she started in 1998 and has run ever since.

She began with a straightforward premise. Parents make dozens of consequential local decisions, schools, doctors, childcare, camps, where to spend a Saturday, and most of that information lived in word of mouth, unevenly distributed and impossible to search. Nearly thirty years later, the premise has held up.

Under her editorship, CharlottesvilleFamily has grown from a print publication into a family of local resources serving Central Virginia, including the annual Go-To Guide and the reader-voted Family Favorite Awards, which launched in 2009 and now draws hundreds of local families each fall. She founded VirginiaSummerCamp.com to help families find summer options, then kept building it into a year-round hub for raising Virginia kids outdoors, covering nature centers, waterfall hikes, and what to do about the box turtle you find crossing the road. In 2026 the company expanded into the Roanoke Valley with RoanokeFamily, building on a print archive that had served Southwest Virginia families for more than a decade. The publications have earned multiple Parenting Media Association Gold Awards.

She is also the author of the Let’s Go! Guide, an insider’s guide to more than 400 family-tested outings around Charlottesville, which is this job in book form.

Outside of publishing she created the Mompreneur and the Doing Good Marketing Grants and the Moms Lit Society, and received the 2025 Caring for Community Award from the United Way of Greater Charlottesville. She serves on the boards of the Child Health Partnership and the Parenting Media Association, and volunteers with Bennett’s Village and the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Illinois and an M.A.Ed. in special education from the University of Northern Colorado, and is raising four children in Charlottesville, her youngest still in high school. The older ones are out in the world now, and she is especially proud that they still come home together when they can, for rafting day trips, hikes, museums and zoos, revisiting favorite childhood adventures.

She travels when she can, hikes, plays pickleball and mahjong, makes cyanotypes, and belongs to more book clubs than is strictly reasonable. She will always pick up an adventure novel with a strong feminist heroine.

Her writing focuses on education, gardening, parenting, family travel, day trips within a couple of hours of home, and the logistics nobody tells you about