Alan Davies was born in Lacombe, a town in central Alberta, Canada. By the mid-1970s, he was editing a poetry journal, Occulist Witnesses, in the Boston area where he had stayed for a few years after attending Robert Creeley’s poetry class at Harvard Summer School in 1972. By this time he had hand-published John Wieners’ treatise on and for young poets, "The Lanterns along the Wall," which Wieners had written especially for Creeley's class. and began more actively publishing his own poetry. Soon, Davies was forming relations with an experimental group of writers whose practice became determining features of what grew into the Language School. This 'school' was not a group precisely, but a tendency in the work of many of its so-called practitioners.

Davies edited A Hundred Posters, one of the important "little" magazines of the "Language" movement. Subsequently, Davies was included in the crucial anthology devoted to "language-centred" writing: In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman (National Poetry Foundation, 1986; 2002).

Alan Davies, who is a Buddhist (as pointed out by Juliana Spahr), is originally from Canada. He has lived in Boston and is currently living and working in New York City.