Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is currently a PhD candidate at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in twentieth-century American writing. Her novel "The Gin Closet" has received rave reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Vogue, and Time Out New York.  Her latest novel, "The Empathy Exams" will be published in 2014.