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 a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta magazine.
His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Five Chapters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. He has also received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship in fiction, and a Whiting Writer's Award. His nonfiction and criticism has appeard in Slate, Kyoto Journal, and The New York Time Book Review. He is currently at work on a new collection of short stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Jess is an assistant professor of English at the College of New Jersey, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Sonya Posmentier, and daughter Mina. A longtime student in the Kwam Um School of Zen, he was ordained a dharma teacher in 2004.