Grace received her Bachelor of Arts in History from Otterbein College (now University) in Westerville, Ohio in 1973.
She received her Ph.D., also from Ohio State, in 1987 after completing her dissertation, "The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature.
Steven Belletto featured Grace in his article “Jack Kerouac, Sophistacte,” writing that Grace's work on Kerouac “demonstrated that the writing’s seemingly simple surfaces conceal much more complex formal structures and aesthetic theories.
See covered Grace’s Breaking the Rule of Cool in her article “Fashion and Female Beat Identity in the Writing of di Prima, Johnson, and Jones.
As Johnson and Grace have illustrated, Beat women are a marginalized group within a marginalized subculture and they must doubly contend with the misogyny of the culture writ large but also within Bohemia.”[5] In 2002, Grace and her research partner Ronna C. Johnson co-edited Girls Who Wore Black, which Isabel Castelao-Gómez referred to as “the first edited volume on Beat women writers with articles that bring academic emphasis on their two major genres: life and poetry.”[6] She is the co-editor of the Journal of Beat Studies published by Pace University Press,[7] the co-editor of the Beat Studies book series published by Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press,[8] and a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association.