Jennifer Vanderbes was born in New York City in 1974.  She received her B.A. in English Literature from Yale and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After graduate school, she was awarded a McCreight Fiction Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, and then the Creative Writing Fellowship at Colgate University.          Her first novel, Easter Island, was named a "best book of 2003" by the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor and was translated into 16 languages.  She has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Columbia University's M.F.A. program.    She was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, and was recently named a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2007-2008.