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Jo Ann Beard

Biography

Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard is the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays, THE BOYS OF MY YOUTH, and the novels IN ZANESVILLE and FESTIVAL DAYS. 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. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Jo Ann Beard

Books by Jo Ann Beard

Festival Days
by Jo Ann Beard - Essays, Nonfiction

When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with FESTIVAL DAYS, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instances when life and death hang in the balance.

In Zanesville
by Jo Ann Beard - Fiction
The Boys of My Youth
by Jo Ann Beard