Jacob Aiello lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, dog and three cats. In the past ten years he has married the aforementioned wife, euthanized two dogs, passed a kidney stone, visited Kansas and amassed a collection of short fiction and creative nonfiction. Some of these stories have been published in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, Nailed Magazine, december, Big Lucks, Quarter After Eight, Spry, Knee-Jerk, Atlas & Alice, Vending Machine Press, Storm Cellar Quarterly, Pinball, Fiddleblack, Menacing Hedge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Litro Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, Storychord, and The Portland Review, among others.

In 2012 he cofounded Soft Show with Sunny Bleckinger, a bi-monthly experimental reading series that weds improvised live drawing with fiction and nonfiction read aloud by the authors.

In 2018 he received the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction from Literary Arts.