Jennifer Egan is an Irish American novelist and short story writer whose novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

Jennifer was born in Chicago and is fourth generation Irish. Her paternal line comes from Strokestown, Co. Roscommon and Cork. She says that she feels a “kinship with other Irish Americans, especially in Chicago, which has a strong, proud, and somewhat unified Irish American population.” She visited Ireland for the first time in 2011, and is “dying to go back or even live there part time.”

She currently lives with her husband David Herskovits and sons Emmanuel and Raoul in Brooklyn.