Tess Gallagher was born on July 21, 1943, in Port Angeles, Washington, to Leslie (a logger and longshoreman) and Georgia Bond. Gallagher received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Washington, where she studied poetry under the guidance of Theodore Roethke, a National Book Award-winning poet. She went on to earn a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of Iowa in 1974.

While she was teaching English at St. Lawrence University in New York, Gallagher published her first collection of poems, Stepping Outside (1974). The following year, she began teaching creative writing at Kirkland College, also in New York, and would eventually publish her second collection, Instructions to the Double (1976), which is often referred to as her best-known work. She would go on to publish six more poetry collections, as well as teach at various other colleges, and marry three times before...