Brett Ellen Block was born and raised in Summit, New Jersey. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, where she was awarded the Hopwood and Haugh prizes for fiction writing. She went on to earn graduate degrees at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of East Anglia's Fiction Writing Program in England.

Her debut collection of short stories, Destination Known, was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2001, and she was a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship in 2003. She is also the author of The Grave of God's Daughter, published by William Morrow in 2004, which Publisher's Weekly called, "A haunting, evocative first novel...Intoxicating."

Her first mystery, The Lightning Rule, will be released in October 2006, also by William Morrow. She splits her time between New Jersey and Los Angeles, California.