Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Jo Ann Beard is an American essayist. 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.

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 of her work. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and magazines.