Jessica Anthony was born in Upstate New York, in a small agricultural community sandwiched between a Native American reservation and a cutlery factory. This has shaped her worldview. Since, she has traveled to over twenty countries, lived twice in Eastern Europe, and worked as a meat-cutter, an obituary writer, a singing telegram gal, and a college professor. Her fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney's, Mid-American Review, New American Writing and elsewhere. She is the winner of the "Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award," the Summer Literary Seminars fiction contest to St. Petersburg, Russia, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.