A Chicagoan originally, J. A. Bernstein's hobbies include running, vegan cooking, and watching Aaron Rodgers get sacked. His works include a novel, Rachel's Tomb (AWP Award Series Prize); a forthcoming book, Afterlight; and three chapbooks: Desert Castles (Wilhelmus Prize); Northern Cowboy (Wilt Prize); and Glass Essays. His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared widely, including in The Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review.

He has published academic articles in The Conradian, Western American Literature, and other volumes, and won the Harkness Young Conrad Scholar Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. The Director of Graduate Studies in English and an associate professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, he is President of the University Faculty Senates Association of Mississippi and was for ten years the fiction editor of Tikkun Magazine.

A two-time Fulbright Fellow and contributing editor at Mississippi Review, he lives with his wife and three children in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.