Nunnally was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and St. Louis Park, Minnesota.
She has a long association with the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, but she is not a salaried faculty member.
[citation needed] Nunnally is a translator of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, who sometimes uses the pseudonym Felicity David when edited into UK English.
Her first novel, Maija, won a Governor's Writers Award from the State of Washington in 1996.
[1] After 2002 she lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband Steven T. Murray, both full-time freelance literary translators.