Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
'Profoundly sad, poignant, and filled with the flabbergasting abundance of life ... an extraordinary achievement' - Mary Gaitskill 'Beard honours the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life, and for life's inescapable cruelites and woes she offers the wisdom of a sage' - Sigrid Nunez 'Beard's wry voice and her clear-eyed compassion make her the best sort of company' - Jonathan Franzen