She was raised in Laurel, Maryland, and graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School, where she was one of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards winners in 1989.

[2] She spent a year teaching and writing in Prague (providing the germ of her book of essays Time's Magpie, which explores her favorite places within the city), then moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives with her husband (Jason Little) and two daughters.

[4] While in Prague, Goldberg completed her first novel, Kirkus, a story of an Eastern European circus troupe engulfed by the onset of World War II.

She gave it to an agent who shopped it for 18 months, but it was not published by the time she had begun working on Bee Season, so it was shelved.

She has also published short stories in Virgin Fiction, Eclectic Literary Forum, New American Writing, McSweeney's and Harpers Magazine.