Jacqueline Ariail is Chicago born and bred, the first of three daughters of native Chicagoans, Ralph E. Ariail Jr., a color lithographer and LaVerne Neubauer, a homemaker,  She grew up a block outside the city, not far from Midway Airport, in Summit, and attended Argo Community High School and then Northwestern University.  She transferred to Princeton a year after the university accepted women as undergraduates.  There she studied English literature and wrote a senior thesis on George Eliot's women, a study in "diligence, submission and self denial."  She was accepted into the program in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in NYC, and her dissertation, "Nature in the British Novel, 1840-1930," earned her a Ph.D. with distinction.

She taught literature and writing at the University of Richmond, in Duke University's Writing Program, and at N.C. State University, and served as a learning consultant in Duke University's Academic Resource Center.  The summer after earning her graduate degree, she wrote a vignette a day--her fiction apprenticeship.  One of these became her first published story, "Morning Offering."  Ariail has published stories in Woman's World, Redbook, and O. Henry Festival Stories, and most recently, Persimmon Tree. Her erotica has appeared in Fever: Sensual Stories by Women Writers as well as Libido: The Journal of Sex and Sensibility.  Her story, "La Toilette," was fourth place winner in the magazine's 1997 fiction contest and was included in the audio adaptation of the very best writing from Libido.  Her fiction has been among the finalists in the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction, the Family Matters Contest at Glimmer Train (2008) and Narrative Magazine’s Winter 2019 Short Story Contest.  She has been a writing fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and has read her work at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York City.