Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre author, she has published work in New England Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, Callaloo, and several journals and anthologies.

MASS FOR SHUT-INS, the 117th winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was released in March 2023 and received the California Book Award. Selecting the collection, Rae Armantrout called it "Flowers of Evil for the 21st century"; the Poetry Foundation describes its "Plathian edge and ear." In 2022, her tri-continental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins), was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.

A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received her PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, she served as the inaugural Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.

She turns to her third and fourth books of poetry and prose as a scholar at Princeton University.