Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University. She has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Baruch College, Washington University, and the University of California, Irvine. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and of several other writers' conferences across the United States. She lives in New York City.

Nunez is the author of six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. Her memoir about Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan, will be published in April, 2011. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including three Pushcart Prize volumes and four volumes of Asian-American literature. Among the journals she has contributed to are The New York Times, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

Nunez's major preoccupations as a novelist have been language, memory, identity, class, and writing itself. She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring, 2005. Among her other honors are a Whiting Writers' Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.