Jessica Anthony was born in 1974 and raised in upstate New York.                    After graduating from Bates College, she taught English in Poland and the Czech Republic, and received an MFA in fiction from George Mason University.                        She is the recipient of McSweeney's inaugural "Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award."                                                                                                                              Her first novel, The Convalescent, reimagines a lost tribe of Hungarians in the 12th century, and the last of their kind, who is selling meat out of a school bus in modern day Virginia. The novel has become a cult classic.                                After The Convalescent, Anthony collaborated with the graphic designer and conceptual artist Rodrigo Corral to create the transmedia novel Chopsticks, which was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, won App of the Year by Apps Magazine, and has been banned in Tennessee.                                                                                                                        Her third novel, Enter the Aardvark, is about a Republican congressman in DC who, one hot August morning, receives a delivery on his front stoop from FedEx: a gigantic taxidermic aardvark that proceeds to bring down his re-election campaign. The novel was a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction, a New York Times Editor's Choice, and was profiled in Time Magazine.                                                                                                                   Her fourth novel, The Most, follows a Delaware housewife over the course of a single  day, when she goes for a swim in her community swimming pool, then realizes that she cannot come out. The Most was longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction.

Anthony has received residency fellowships from the Millay Colony, Ucross, MacDowell, the Hermitage, Bogliasco (Italy), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Anderson Center. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for Literature.