Nancy Kress (born January 20, 1948) is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella "Beggars in Spain" which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.
Born Nancy Anne Koningisor in Buffalo, New York and grown up in East Aurora, she attended college at SUNY Plattsburgh. In 1973, she moved to Rochester to marry Michael Joseph Kress. They had two sons, and divorced in 1984. At that time, she went to work at Stanton and Hucko, an advertising agency.In 1998, she married fellow author Charles Sheffield, who died in 2002 of a brain tumor. Kress moved back to Rochester, New York, to be near her grown children. She recently (2009) moved to Seattle.
She tends to write technically realistic stories set in a fairly near future.Her fiction often involves genetic engineering, and, to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence. She loves ballet, and has written stories around it.