Guggenheim Fellowship Pushcart Prize Jean Thompson (born January 3, 1950) is an American novelist, short story writer, and teacher of creative writing.

She lives in Urbana, Illinois, where she has spent much of her career, and is a professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having also taught at San Francisco State University, Reed College, and Northwestern University.

[1] Jean Thompson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and during her childhood the family lived briefly in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee.

[2][3] Her first stories were published in little magazines while she was still in her early twenties, and not long after that she began to be published in more visible venues, such as Ploughshares and The New Yorker.

[5] Thompson "often writes about the difficulties and complexities of love," and her work "focuses on the lives of ordinary people, often women, living in the overlooked center" of the United States.