Jade Sharma grew up as a US Army brat, spending most of her childhood in Germany and her teenage years in Japan. She began writing aged 14, after dropping out of school, as a means of coping with her depression. Her mother’s favorite piece of writing was a story Sharma wrote as a kid in which a married couple try to kill each other on the same day. When she quit high school, Sharma worked at a bookstore and mini-mart on a Navy Base. Later she performed spoken word at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York and won enough slams that she was invited to join the team to represent NYC in the nationals in Seattle. She studied literature at Hunter College, and it was while she was getting her MFA in New York that she began the novel that would become Problems. She died in 2019.