The author of the seminal essay collections, Festival Days and Boys of My Youth, as well as the novel In Zaneville, Jo Ann Beard has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Whiting Writers’ Foundation, and has twice been included in The Best American Essay series. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence.

“When I was a student at the U of I, an undergraduate studying painting, I took a writing class from Bob Shacochis, a writer both venerable and irascible who smoked in the classroom. This was back in the day when all the campus corridors had built-in ashtrays, but still. Bob Shacochis read my first story, two and a half pages long, in which a woman possibly cuts her own throat after her son chokes to death in his high chair while she's switching the laundry. It was strange and elliptical and ended with an oxymoron that I still recall (“Jude felt the fullness of such a reduction”) and Bob, a tanned and crabby Floridian, first explained what an oxymoron was to us (morons) and then said to me: “I'm not worried about you.” Such praise was an immense boost to a small spirit and I became a writer on the way home that afternoon, sitting on the bus, reading and rereading his margin notes. Bob's refusal to worry about me is what got my first novel 95% written and then abandoned, and it's what got me to eventually apply to the graduate Nonfiction Writing Program, where they accepted me, and where I would walk a few days a week, down the hill from my physics office, to meet up with my colleagues and my beloved teachers who were smarter than me (I) and taught me to understand the essay as an art form, and to love it. The powers of progress pried the ashtrays off the campus walls at some point but you can walk right up the hill to the Mill or George's or the Foxhead, where it's always twenty years ago. Also, the strange tall corn, the prairie sky and Prairie Lights, Hickory Hill Park, and the Iowa River. The best thing about Iowa will always be Iowa. I would go there again if I could.”