Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, published jointly in the United Kingdom as The Collected Works. She is also the author of the novel In Zanesville, and the novella Cheri. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2022, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature and in 2024 was announced as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.