Jeanine Cummins is the bestselling, award-winning author of the groundbreaking memoir A Rip in Heaven and the novels The Outside Boy, The Crooked Branch, and American Dirt. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.

Cummins was born in Rota, Spain, where her father, Gene, was stationed as a member of the US Navy. Her mother, Kay, was a nurse. Cummins spent her childhood in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and attended Towson University, where she majored in English and communications. In 1993 Cummins was a finalist in the Rose of Tralee festival, an international event that is celebrated among Irish communities all over the world; at each festival in Tralee, Ireland, a woman is crowned the Rose. After university, she spent two years working as a bartender in Belfast, Northern Ireland, before moving back to the United States in 1997 and beginning work at Penguin in New York City. She worked in the publishing industry for 10 years.

Her 2004 memoir, A Rip in Heaven, focuses on the attempted murder of her brother, Tom, and the murder of two of her cousins on the Chain of Rocks Bridge in St. Louis, Missouri when Cummins was 16. She declined offers for film rights to the book.

Her next two novels explore Irish history. The Outside Boy (2010) is about Pavee travellers. The Crooked Branch (2013) is about the Great Famine of Ireland. These books were published for the first time in Ireland in 2020.

Cummins' 2020 novel, American Dirt, tells the story of a mother and bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who attempts to escape to the United States with her son after their family is killed by a drug cartel. In 2018 the book was sold to Flatiron after a three-day bidding war between nine publishers that resulted in a seven-figure deal. From 2018 until its publication in January 2020, the book was heavily marketed, receiving many positive reviews and the coveted book release day endorsement by Oprah Winfrey as the 83rd book chosen for Oprah's Book Club.