Kane grew up in Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey. Her father, Edwin Julian Kane, was a radio and TV newscaster, and her mother, Nanette Spillane Kane, was a grade school teacher who published a handful of articles and short stories in journals like Redbook and The Christian Science Monitor.

Kane graduated from Cornell University in 1974, where she studied with A. R. Ammons, William Matthews, and Robert Morgan. She won the Mademoiselle Magazine College Poetry Competition, which was judged by Sexton and James Merrill, and went on to study with Sexton at Boston University, where she received her M.A. in Creative Writing. From Boston, Kane moved to Exeter, New Hampshire, as the first woman named to the George Bennett Fellowship in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy.

In 1976, Kane moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she began to incorporate her impressions of the unique landscape and culture of the area into her poetry. Taking a job as a technical writer in New Orleans, she became associated with poets who frequented the weekly literary readings held at the Maple Leaf Bar...including Yusef Komunyakaa, Grace Bauer, and Everette Maddox. In 1982, British poet Geoffrey Godbert's Only Poetry Press published a two-woman collection of Kane's and Ruth Adatia's poems, titled Two Into One. In 1987, Kane's first full-length poetry collection, Body and Soul, came out from Pirogue Publishing. In 1991, Greville Press published her chapbook, The Bartender Poems, and she was introduced by Harold Pinter at the Southbank Centre in London.

Kane returned to graduate school at Louisiana State University in 1991. While there, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize and wrote her dissertation on the villanelle under poet Dave Smith. After earning her PhD, she took a position at Northwestern State University, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to Vilnius Pedagogical University, and a two-time Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Her work has appeared in The Formalist, The Southern Review, London Magazine, Feminist Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Twentieth Century Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Two of her poems have been set to music by composer Libby Larsen and recorded on CDs by the American Boychoir and by mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer.

Poetry

• "Learning Curve (What They Taught Me)"; 'From "Sex Appeal of the Presidents"', poemeleon

• chapbook
• chapbook

Editor

Memoir

Anthologies