Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Bradford Morrow grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has lived or worked in a variety of places. As a teenager, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California where he worked as a rare bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he founded the literary journal Conjunctions and began writing novels. 

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Professor Emeritus in Literature at Bard College, Morrow has taught writing at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute. He has served on the board of trustees and as chairman of the Forums Committee at PEN American Center, and remains a member of PEN and the Author’s Guild. He has been the literary executor of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust since Rexroth’s death in 1982. He is currently President of the newly formed Conjunctions Foundation dedicated to publishing contemporary innovative writing in print and online, based in New York City and Livingston Manor, New York. He is also the founder and director of The Conjunctions Residency: Writers Helping Writers, a nonprofit three-week residency program in upstate New York for poets, fiction writers, and essayists who have volunteered their time and expertise to benefit others in the literary community.

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His writing and editorial work have garnered Morrow numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, O. Henry and Pushcart prizes for his short stories, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award and CLMP's Lord Nose Award for excellence in editing a literary journal. His novel Trinity Fields was a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, and The Almanac Branch was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York Times named The Forger's Daughter a "Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020" selection. His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, comes out with Grove Atlantic in January 2025. The final book in his Forger’s Trilogy, which includes The Forgers and The Forger’s Daughter, took him ten years to complete. He is currently at work on a new novel about birds and completing a short story collection, tentatively titled Walkers. He divides his time between New York City and upstate New York.