Antonya Nelson was born in Wichita, Kansas. She attended the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona, where she received an MFA in 1986. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she recently was named by The New Yorker as one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium."

Antonya Nelson is consistently praised for the beauty of her writing and for her exploration of the emotional terrain of women. In a recent review, The Washington Post Book World caller her "a formidable writer. That is, she's a woman of piercing intelligence, a first-rate stylist, an explorer of language who questions all its customary uses while fashioning evocative descriptions and incisive phrases."

She is the recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts grant and 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. She divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.