Originally from Normal, Illinois, she moved to Southern California at the age of 19, and on to London in 2001.
[1] Etter holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA, MA and PhD from the University of California, Irvine, gaining her doctorate in 2003 in English on mid-Victorian fiction and early British criminology.
Her reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others.
Etter has published essays on Peter Reading, W. B. Yeats, and Sherman Alexie.
[citation needed] In 2013 she received an Authors' Foundation grant from the Society of Authors for work on her third collection, Imagined Sons, which went on to be shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by the Poetry Society.