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Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents—her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Washington, where she studied with Theodore Roethke in his last poetry workshop. She has taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, and St. Lawrence University in New York, among other places, and has made regular trips to Ireland since 1968. It was through friends in Ireland that she met Josie Gray, her “Irish companion,” with whom she has co-authored Barnacle Soup, a collaboration of stories Gray has crafted through years of their telling, which Gallagher has captured and preserved on the page.

Gallagher has participated in other collaborative efforts including translating the work of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, and writing plays and screenplays with her late husband Raymond Carver. She has published eight books of poetry: Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts; two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses and Soul Barnacles; two collections of short stories, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon; and a book-length interview with Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, Distant Rain.

Gallagher's work is “substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual,” writes Donna Seaman of Booklist, and “evokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake.” In a way not unlike Wordsworth, Gallagher manages to enshrine not only the mundane, but the tragic, by seeing the world as her holy place. She was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muffins and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coffee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees.