J. A. Bernstein's works include a novel, Rachel's Tomb (New Issues, AWP Award Series Novel Prize Winner, 2019); a forthcoming book, Afterlight (Galileo); and three chapbooks: Desert Castles (Southern Indiana Review Press, Wilhelmus Prize Winner, 2019); Northern Cowboy (Green Rabbit Press, Wilt Prize Winner, 2021); and Glass Essays (Variant, 2023). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in about a hundred journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, Washington Square, The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, and Notre Dame Review.

He has published academic essays 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 Chicagoan originally, he lives with his wife and three children in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.