Devon Walker-Figueroa grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Chemeketa Community College, Cornell University, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow in fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Zyzzyva, and her debut collection of poems, Philomath, was selected by Sally Keith for the National Poetry Series, won the Levis Reading Prize, and was the first collection of poems to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Walker-Figueroa has worked as a professional ballet and modern dancer, research assistant, classical harpist, bartender, literary editor, and creative writing instructor and is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.