Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard is an American essayist.

Beard was born in 1955, Chicago, Illinois. 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.

Beard previously worked as an 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 Tin House and The New Yorker.

• 1997 Whiting Award
• 2005 Guggenheim Fellow

Essays

• "The Fourth State of Matter", The New Yorker, June 24, 1996
• "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow," Tin House, Issue #12, Summer 2002
• "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.

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.