Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. Her retrospective Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001) includes her four collections, Portraits and Elegies (1982), The Lamplit Answer (1985), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1995), and The Throne of Labdacus (2000), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection is Heavenly Questions, winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize, published in hardback in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010 and in paperback by Bloodaxe in the UK in 2011.

She has won many literary awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize for Literature, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy for Arts and Letters. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. She divides her time between Tacoma and Boston, Massachusetts.