Presently on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University and an editor of The Literary Review, Ashley is the author of five collections of poetry, two chapbooks and a novel.
[1] Her father worked infrequently in a ball bearing factory and her mother was a PBX telephone operator and secretary; she was their only child.
[3][6] She previously taught creative writing at Ramapo College (1989–1993) in Mahwah, New Jersey and at Rockland Center for the Arts (1985–1995) in West Nyack, New York.
"[10] Publishers Weekly reviewed Ashley's seventh book of poetry, Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea (2013), a series of prose poems on the subjects of "sex, courtship, fear, fatigue, loyalty, companion animals, and human regret" as "squared-off, almost blindingly vivid" and "committed to individual feeling, lyric, texture, emotional rawness, and authenticity.
"[11] A six-line excerpt from Ashley's poem "First Book of the Moon" in The Revisionist's Dream (2001) was selected for a permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland in New York City's Pennsylvania Station.
[12] "...We dream our lives But the rivers breathe flint and spark And each night we believe in everything— The shifting edge of light And dark, the possibility of what we think we are And what we think we see.