Kelle Groom was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Florida, Hawaii, Spain, and Texas. Her collections of poetry include Underwater City (2004); Luckily (2006), which won a Florida Book Award; and Five Kingdoms (2010), also a Florida Book Award winner. Her poems and writing have appeared in the New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Non-Required Reading, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Groom's memoir of adoption, alcoholism, and the death of her infant son, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (2011), was an editor's choice selection for the New York Times, Oxford American, and O Magazine, and was named a best memoir of 2011 by Library Journal.

The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Groom has also been awarded fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in partnership with the Library of Congress, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. Currently the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, Groom is also on faculty of Sierra Nevada's low-residency MFA Program. She is a contributing editor of The Florida Review.