Jon Hickey was born in Mankato, Minnesota and grew up in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He is an enrolled citizen of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Anishinaabe). He currently lives in San Francisco with his family.
He is the author of the novel Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, 2025). His short fiction has appeared in The Madison Review, Meridian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, among other places. His work explores themes of belonging in Indigenous experience off and on the reservation, how the mid-20th century Relocation and Termination Acts have fractured the sense of Indigenous identity, and how people seek to reclaim connection to their communities in environments far from home.