Renée Ashley grew up in California and lives in New Jersey. Her newest  book is Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry: Ruined Traveler (forthcoming from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions), The View from the Body (Black Lawrence Press), Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea (Subito Press Book Prize), Basic Heart (X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press), The Revisionist’s Dream, The Various Reasons of Light (both Avocet Press), and Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press), as well as two chapbooks, The Verbs of Desiring (new american press award) and The Museum of Lost Wings (Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Hill-Stead Museum). She has also published a novel, Someplace Like This (Permanent Press). Her agent is Laura Langlie.

A portion of her poem First Book of the Moon is included in a permanent installation by the artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station Terminal in Manhattan.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency graduate programs, the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators.