She is a writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College in Amherst County, Virginia.

[1] Her most recent novel, The Stargazer's Sister, was published by Pantheon Books in January 2016.

A Greenwich, Connecticut native, Brown graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1975.

She has taught at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and became an English professor at Sweet Briar College after serving as Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence.

[citation needed] She lives with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, in Sweet Briar, Virginia.