[2] Her father, United States Army Colonel William Livingston Travis, was a 1933 West Point graduate who won the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II.
[1] In 1957 she was awarded a Master of Arts degree by Cornell University for her thesis The Fences of Robert Frost: The Changes in his Ways of Approaching Philosophical Problems.
She earned a PhD from Cornell in 1967 for her dissertation on Robert Frost's poetic style entitled Agnosticism as Technique.
[4][6] Lauriat Lane Jr. taught English at the University of New Brunswick until 1990 and was named an emeritus professor on his retirement.
[16]: ix Lynes notes that Lane's "primary compositional investment" is in "the sonic elements of language—noise, the play of sound" rather than in the subject matter of the poem.
[16]: xi Lane herself has said that she is inspired to write by "everything: nature, science, the news, art, music, something someone has said, most of all, other poetry".
[10] M. Travis Lane is Honorary President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick and was a founding member of the organization.