Jess Row

Jess Row was born in 1974 in Washington, DC. After graduating from Yale in 1997, he taught English for two years as a Yale-China fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He completed an MFA at the University of Michigan in 2001. His first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. His second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, was published by FiveChapters Books in February 2011. His first novel, Your Face in Mine, will be published by Riverhead Books in August 2014.

His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories (most recently in The Best American Short Stories 2011) and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has also received an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers Award. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues.

Jess is an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey and a member of the international faculty of the MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for twenty years, he is an ordained dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.