Jessica Francis Kane is the author of the novel “The Report” (Graywolf) and the story collection “Bending Heaven” (Counterpoint/Chatto & Windus).

“The Report” has been shortlisted for the 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and is a Winter 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

Anthony Doerr called it “a graceful and dignified look at a single event that quickly becomes something so much more expansive: a kaleidoscopic examination of crowds, of disasters, of reverberations and reckoning.  I was absolutely riveted.”

The New York Times Book Review praised “Bending Heaven” as “that rarest of debut collections: grounded but thoughtful, learned without being pretentious. Jessica Francis Kane’s stories take place in what feels like Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro country — they smartly uncork the heartache, panic and frustration of characters caught in situations that expose their vulnerability.”

Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio and been published by McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Swink, Narrative, the Missouri Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing writer to The Morning News.

A recipient of the 2001 Lawrence Foundation Prize, Kane has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She lives in New York with her family.

Visit her online at www.jessicafranciskane.com.