Joan Frank was born to New Yorkers in Phoenix, Arizona. She spent adolescence in Sacramento, CA, and attended the University of California at Davis as an English major and French minor. Thereafter she traveled widely, living in Hawaii, West Africa, France, and finally the Bay Area, moving to Santa Rosa in 1996. She studied fiction with Thaisa Frank (no relation) at the University of California in Berkeley, and later took a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Fiction at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

Joan is the author of two novels, THE GREAT FAR AWAY and MISS KANSAS CITY (winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award), and two story collections: IN ENVY COUNTRY (winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction) and BOYS KEEP BEING BORN (finalist, with The Great Far Away, for both a Northern California Book Award in Fiction and the Paterson Fiction Award).

She is a MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, a Pushcart Prize- and Bread Loaf Fellow nominee, winner of the Dana Portfolio Award, Emrys Fiction Award, and Iowa Writing Award, San Francisco Public Library Literary Laureate, and recipient of grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives and writes in Santa Rosa.