Nancy Donegan was born in Watertown, Massachusetts and has lived in Boston and Brockton, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. She graduated from Boston College and received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has received awards for writing from the American Academy of Poets and from the Massachusetts Arts Lottery Commission. She teaches in the English Department at Brown University.

“Nancy Donegan has a marvelous ear for language and for the hidden utterance, what goes for raw speech in current parlance, that makes a poem resonate just beneath the surface of the telling. She is capable of making music of seeming disparate lines that fade and reappear in the corpus of her work. She is always probing for the epiphanies that sound, again and again, in her poems.”
—Michael S. Harper