Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles and studied at Vassar College and the University of Iowa, where she earned an MA, an MFA and a PhD. She taught at Iowa State University from 1981 to 1996.
Her novels include The Greenlanders (1988), A Thousand Acres (1991), Moo (1995) and the Iowa family trilogy that begins with Some Luck (2014). She moved to California in 1996 and returned to teaching creative writing at UC Riverside in 2015.