Jane Smiley lives in California with her three children, three dogs, and her sixteen (and counting) horses. Born in Los Angeles, California, Jane moved to the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, as an infant, and lived there through grammar school and high school (The John Burroughs School). After getting her BA at Vassar College in 1971, she traveled in Europe for a year, working on an archeological dig and sight-seeing, then returned to Iowa for graduate school at the University of Iowa.

MFA and Ph.D. in hand, she went to work in 1981 at Iowa State University, in Ames, where she taught until 1996. She has been married three She has two daughters, Phoebe Silag (1978), Lucy Silag (1982) and one son, AJ Mortensen (1992). Jane is the author of ten works of fiction, as well as many essays for many magazines. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, getting dressed, Barbie, marriage, and many other topics. She is also the author, from Crown, of a book on craftspeople living in the Catskills. Her new novel Horse Heaven is being published in April 2000. She is now at work on a novel about sex set in Hollywood.