Jack Murnighan was raised in central Illinois, where he attended public schools, frequently representing them in statewide math competitions.
Since 1998, he has lived and worked in New York City as an editor and freelance writer, and, since 2003, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
In 2009 he wrote Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits (2009), a manual for getting the most meaning and pleasure out of fifty of the most challenging (and rewarding) books in the Western canon.
[1] From late 1998-2001, he wrote Jack’s Naughty Bits, a weekly column for nerve.com on sex and sexuality in the history of literature, which was turned into two books: The Naughty Bits (2001) and Classic Nasty (2003).
In 2000 he co-edited (with Genevieve Field) the short story collection Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve.com, containing pieces by Jay McInerney, A. M. Homes, Robert Olen Butler, Mary Gaitskill, and Elizabeth Wurtzel.