Anne Valley-Fox was born in Paterson, New Jersey, grew up in Santa Monica, California, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where a reading by the poet Denise Levertov drew her into the San Francisco poetry scene. She co-authored her first book, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life through Writing and Storytelling, with Sam Keen. She and her one-year-old son, Ezra, moved to northern New Mexico in 1978, where she worked in the Artists in the Schools program, traveling blue highways around the state, coaxing children to channel their wild imaginations into stories and poems. Anne published her first book of poems, Sending the Body Out, in 1986. Her son Kalu was born the following year. She worked as a writer and researcher with the educational resource group Project Crossroads for nearly four decades and co-edited five volumes of oral histories culled from the archives of the New Mexico Federal Writers Project. During that time she published three poetry collections: Fish Drum 15, Point of No Return, and How Shadows Are Bundled. Nightfall is her most recent collection.

Anne lives under the beautiful, protean skies of New Mexico with the writer Tom Ireland.