Jo Ann Beard (born 1955) is an American essayist.

Beard was born in 1955 in Moline, Illinois.^[1] She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA degree in art, and from the Nonfiction Writing Program with an MFA in creative nonfiction. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.^[2]

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 for her work.

Her writing has appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Tin House and O, The Oprah Magazine.

• 1997: Whiting Award
• 2005: Guggenheim Fellow^[3]

• 2024: Royal Society of Literature International Writer^[4]

• "The Fourth State of Matter", The New Yorker, June 24, 1996
• "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow", Tin House, Issue #12, Summer 2002^[5]
• "Maybe It Happened", O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2008
• "The Longest Night: Saying Goodbye to My Beloved Pet", O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2009

• The Boys of My Youth. Little Brown & Co. 1999. ISBN 978-0-316-08525-0.
• In Zanesville. 2011.
• Festival Days. Little Brown & Co. 2021.
• Cheri. Serpent's Tail. 2023.

• 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.

• "Meet a rare creature: the wholly talented, wholly modest Jo Ann Beard", Book Page, February 1998
• "A Conversation with Jo Ann Beard", nidus, No. 3 Fall 2002.
• "Jo Ann Beard Interviewed by Michael Gardner", Mary Literary Journal
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• "The Essay That Made Jo Ann Beard Want to Write Nonfiction", The New York Times, March 11, 2021.

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