Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard (born 1955) is an American essayist from Moline, Illinois. She earned a BFA in art and an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she worked as a managing editor for a physics journal and was connected to the 1991 campus shooting that inspired her renowned essay "The Fourth State of Matter." She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has received awards including the Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.