Nana McNeil is California-born and attended the University of California at Berkeley where she studied with Josephine Miles. She lived in Chicago for 40 years, spending summers in Montana from 1958 to 1990, when she retired to the Flathead Valley. In 1973 she received an MFA from the University of Chicago and went on to teach Oriental Art History at the junior college level. She has been writing all of her life; her grandfather was a poet and her father was a novelist. Her work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Accent, Branches, Falling Star, and she has self-published a chapbook (2007) with a new one (The Pink Hat) coming out soon.