She was involved in Chicago’s Catholic and African American communities, serving as a time as an editor of Community Magazine at Friendship House in Chicago,[2] and publishing poetry in the National Catholic Reporter.
Her literary career aligned with a growing movement emerging after the 1950s of academic institutions in Chicago to foster poets.
[4] Vertreace-Doody was the featured Illinois poet in the winter 1988 issue of Spoon River Quarterly.
[7] Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry (University of Illinois Press), Poets of the New Century (David R. Godine Publisher), and Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience (University of Iowa Press) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody Publishing).
Her 2014 work, In This Glad Hour, was based on a study of diaries and letters from 1824 to 1848, to create a collection of poems that chronicles and gives voice to the life of Elizabeth Duncan, the wife of Joseph Duncan, the sixth governor of Illinois.