Chase Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and has lived for many years in the Adirondacks. A practicing Buddhist, she is the author of several books of poetry, and her work often reflects her spiritual practice. Introducing her collection The Snow Watcher (1998) to readers of the Washington Post, poet and critic Robert Pinsky describes the poems as “full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness, and, as the book progresses, they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity.”

Twichell’s work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists’ Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Princeton University, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Alabama, and Hampshire College. In 1999 she left teaching to form Ausable Press, a nonprofit, independent literary press that she operated until it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009.