Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Moline, Illinois, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Iowa
Genre	Essay

Jo Ann Beard is an American essayist.

Life

Beard was born in 1955 in Moline, Illinois.^{[citation needed]} She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA in art, and from the Nonfiction Writing Program with an MFA in creative nonfiction. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.^[1]

Beard previously worked as a managing editor for a physics journal at the University of Iowa, and was a colleague of the victims of the University of Iowa shooting, which became a subject for her work.

Her writing has appeared in literary journals and magazines.

Awards

• 1997 Whiting Award
• 2005 Guggenheim Fellow^[2]

Works

Essays

• "The Fourth State of Matter", The New Yorker, June 24, 1996
• "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow," Tin House, Issue #12, Summer 2002^[3]
• "Maybe It Happened", O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2008
• "The Longest Night: Saying Goodbye to My Beloved Pet", O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2009

Books

• The Boys of My Youth. Little Brown & Co. 1999. ISBN 978-0-316-08525-0.
• In Zanesville. 2011.
• Festival Days. Little Brown & Co. 2021.
• Cheri. Serpent's Tail. 2023.

Anthologies

• Ian Frazier; Robert Atwan, eds. (1997). Best American Essays of 1997. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-85694-9.
• David Foster Wallace; Robert Atwan, eds. (October 10, 2007). The Best American Essays 2007. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-618-70927-4.
• Lex Williford; Michael Martone, eds. (2007). "The Fourth State of Matter". Touchstone anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction: work from 1970 to the present. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-3174-6.
• Marybeth Bond; Pamela Michael, eds. (2004). "Out There". A Woman's Passion for Travel: True Stories of World Wanderlust. Travelers' Tales. ISBN 978-1-932361-14-8.

References

External links

• "Meet a rare creature: the wholly talented, wholly modest Jo Ann Beard", Book Page, February 1998
• "A Conversation with Jo Ann Beard", nidus, No. 3 Fall 2002.
• "Jo Ann Beard Interviewed by Michael Gardner", Mary Literary Journal
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/books/review/jo-ann-beard-by-the-book-interview.html