Jaroslav (Jarda) Cervenka was born and brought up in Prague where he studied medicine (MD) and, later, human genetics (PhD). During the Soviet invasion in 1968, he emigrated to Minnesota where he has been employed by the University of Minnesota as Professor of Medical Genetics until the present. He has also lived and worked in Nigeria, Japan, and Kenya.

His thinking and views have been influenced mainly by extensive travel and studies of diverse peoples and cultures. He visited stone-age Cholos of Colombia, Inuit in Canada, Tamils in South India and Sri Lanka, Polynesians in most of the Pacific Island states, mountain tribes of the Golden Triangle in Thailand, many African tribes, Slavs of Bohemia, and others. His interest in mountaineering has taken him to hike up Kilimanjaro, to winter solo Fuji, and to climb Aconcagua in Argentina.

When he grows up he wants to become a writer, full-time.

A listing of admired writers would be very long, but some of the story writers closest to his heart are Garcia Marquez, Kundera, Matthiessen, and E. Annie Proulx. Regarding himself, Cervenka has written that he writes because "it gives me pleasure to construct a story from memories of true events, mixing in fictitious characters, lying about a happy end, revealing imaginary faults and virtues, manipulating the lead character to his or her demise or triumph, while struggling with English, my second language. And all that for one main purpose: To undisguise the truth, as I know it. In the breaks between this adventurous struggle of writing I enjoy to conspire to meet new acquaintances with stories to tell, preferably in places far away from suburbia."

He has won the Words Worth Contest of the Minnesota Daily, published a story and a few translations of poems by Jaroslav Seifert (Nobel Prize laureate) in Boundaries of Twilight, an anthology, and several poems and stories in the Japanese publication Blue Jacket. Other stories were published in the anthology Full Circle Nineteen, in Explorations 98, in Ragmag, and others.

In 1994 he won the Minnesota Voices Contest for the collection of stories Mal dí Afrique and in 2000 he won The Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction for the collection of stories Revenge of Underwater.