She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and received her BA and MFA in creative writing and English from the University of Michigan, where her fiction won the Hopwood Award while still a graduate student.

[1] She settled in Seattle and was married to poet Nelson Bentley, a professor at the University of Washington, from 1952 until his death in 1990.

[2] Her poems appeared in a number of magazines and journals including Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

[1] She published two full-length collections of poems, both with Ohio University Press: Phone Calls From the Dead in 1970 and Country of Resemblances in 1976.

Her collections include: Little Fires (1998); The Purely Visible (1980); Philosophical Investigations (1977); Country of Resemblances (1976); Field of Snow (1973); and Phone Calls from the Dead (1972).