Her novel Stone Arabia (2011) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Her novel Eat the Document (2006) was a National Book Award finalist and won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her novel Lightning Field (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book of the year.
She was a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Spiotta lives in Central New York with her husband and daughter; she teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.