Shelley Jackson is a San Francisco-based writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including the groundbreaking hypertext Patchwork Girl (1995). Born in the Philippines in 1963, Shelley Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California, where her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years. She graduated from Berkeley High School and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. A drawing of a naked woman with dotted-line scars in one of her notebooks expanded into her first hypertext novel Patchwork Girl and became Eastgate's best selling CD-ROM title. After this non-chronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shelley Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body (1997) and The Doll Games (2001) which she wrote with her sister Pamela. In 2001 she received the Electronic Literature Award.

In the later nineties, Shelley Jackson wrote short stories (among others, in The Paris Review and Conjunctions) and children's books. Shelley Jackson's first short story collection entitled The Melancholy of Anatomy appeared in 2002. A year later, she launched the Skin Project, a novella published in the form of tattoos on the skin of volunteers. Shelley Jackson's first novel, Half Life (2006), tells a story of a disenchanted conjoined twin named Nora Olney who plots to have her other twin murdered. For this novel, she won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for science fiction and fantasy in 2006. Refusing to be trapped in only one medium, Shelley Jackson also did illustrations and covers for two short story collections by Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic For Beginners (2005), and her own children's books, The Old Woman and the Wave (1998) and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog (2002).