She was born in Penrith, New South Wales, and has had 39 books published: 30 poetry collections, 6 novels and 3 nonfiction works.

Aside from writing, Jennifer Maiden runs writers workshops with a variety of literary, community and educational organizations and has devised and co-written (with Margaret Cunningham Bennett, who was then the director of the New South Wales Torture and Trauma Rehabilitation Service) a manual of questions to facilitate writing by Torture and Trauma Victims.

Her second novel Play With Knives has been translated into German as Ein Messer im Haus (dtv, 1994).

Her collection, Pirate Rain, won The Melbourne Age Poetry Book of the Year in 2010 and the N.S.W.

Her collection, Drones and Phantoms, was published by Giramondo in 2014, and won the 2015 ALS Gold Medal.

[4] Maiden's collection, The Metronome, deals partly with the 2016 U.S. elections and includes their result in its epilogue.

[6] Her fourth novel, Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, was published online in December, 2016, as an exclusive from Quemar Press.

[8] Her collection, Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power, was released by Quemar Press in 2018.

In December 2019, an advance copy was included in Fairfax Media's list of most appreciated books in 2019'[11] In 2020, another non-fiction work by Jennifer Maiden was released, entitled The Cuckold and the Vampires: an essay on some aspects of conservative political manipulation of art and literature, including the experimental, and the conservatives' creation of conflict.