Born in Chicago, she spent 10 years as a professional director and actress on off-Broadway stages in New York City before relocating to the rural community of Cornville, Maine.

Stevens developed adult education and literacy programs for high-school dropouts, teen parents, the disabled, prison inmates, and seniors.

[7] Later she launched the Crossroads Learning Center in Skowhegan to provide living accommodations and alternative education for teenage mothers.

It was renamed the Marti Stevens Learning Center after her death in 1993 and has evolved into a coeducational alternative education program.

[4][7] Stevens also co-developed the Training for Tomorrow program for displaced homemakers with the Maine Centers for Women, Work and Community.

[4] In this capacity, she arranged for one-on-one and private group tutoring for adults hampered by low levels of literacy, including high school dropouts, the disabled, and seniors.

[4] In 1973[10] she was asked by a Cornville school principal to direct the fifth-grade play and, desiring to give back to her new community, agreed.

[17] In her work as director of the Somerset County Basic Skills Program, Stevens founded the Maine Literacy Theater in 1985.

[20] Her holdings included "a steer, two cows, two horses, eight goats, a pair of ewes, laying hens, two dogs and nine cats".

[2] In 1972 a picture of her, the former "city girl", straddling an ornery goat in order to milk it was snapped by an Associated Press reporter and reprinted by newspapers around the country.