Jaimy Gordon’s first novel was Shamp of the City-Solo (New York: McPherson & Company, 1974; Third Edition, revised, with Afterword by the Author, 1993). In 1975-1977, she was Writer-in-Residence with the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She received her first Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and was on the Literature Grants Screening Panel for the NEA in 1979. During this period she published a book-length narrative poem, The Bend, The Lip, The Kid (New York: Sun, 1978), and a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue (Providence: Burning Deck, 1979). She was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1979-1980, after which she spent one year (1980-1981) as an assistant professor at Stephens College, and joined the faculty of Western Michigan University as an assistant professor in Fall, 1981. She was a Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University, in 1984-85. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, appeared in 1990 (New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), as did her first translation (with Peter Blickle) from the German of Maria Beig, Lost Weddings (New York: Persea Books).

In 1991 she received an Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as her third Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She became a full professor at Western Michigan in 1992. Her third novel, Bogeywoman, appeared in 1999 and was on the Los Angeles Times Best Books List for 2000. She has been on the Writing Committee for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown since 1999, and has been a juror for the Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellowship eight times. Her fiction (along with that of three other American writers) was the subject of an international conference, Imagination Alive Imagine, Symposium sur la literature Americaine contemporaine, at L'Institut Charles V, Université Paris 7, in 2001. Her translation of Maria Beig's Hermine, an Animal Life appeared from New Issues in 2005. Her short fiction, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in the Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry International, and many other places, as well as in Best American Short Stories. In 2010, her Lord of Misrule received the National Book Award.