The Knitting Circle (2005) The Red Thread (2010) Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (2008) Ann Hood (born December 9, 1956) is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares,[1] and Tin House.

[3] After Hood earned her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island, she worked for the now-defunct airline TWA as a flight attendant,[4] living in Boston and Saint Louis and later moving to New York City.

A year earlier, her older brother, Skip, died in a freak accident and Hood was struggling with how to cope with the loss.

[8] Hood’s short story "Total Cave Darkness," about an alcoholic woman who runs away with a Protestant minister nine years younger than she is, appeared in The Paris Review in 2000.

The title story appeared in Glimmer Train in 2004 about a young girl who slowly discovers her mother is having an affair with their neighbor.

Hood’s best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), chronicling the death of her five-year-old daughter Grace and her subsequent search for healing, was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly[12] and was a New York Times Editor's Choice.

The dirt at El Santuario de Chimayo, a Roman Catholic church, is believed to have healing properties and thousands flock to the site each year.

To make sense of her own grief, in late 2004 Hood began to write her novel The Knitting Circle, about a woman whose five-year-old daughter dies from meningitis.