Jill Bialosky was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. She put herself through Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where she majored in English and took her first poetry workshop. Then she studied for her master of fine arts degree at Johns Hopkins University and moved back to Cleveland. While working as a waitress, Bialosky tried to write poetry in her spare time, but soon decided instead to enter the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, earning her masters of fine arts degree there.

Bialosky began her career as an editor, eventually becoming a poet and then a novelist. Her first book, a collection of poetry on themes such as childhood and motherhood called The End of Desire, was published in 1997. In 1998, she coedited a collection of stories and essays called Wanting a Child, which was partly inspired by the fact that two of her children died from premature...