Rivka Galchen grew up in Oklahoma, the child of Israeli immigrants. She received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Her fiction and essays have appeared The Believer, Harper's, The New Yorker, Scientific American and The New York Times. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and in 2010 she was named by The New Yorker as one of the top twenty American authors under the age of forty.