She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985, and Indiana University. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University, 2000) and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, and in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah.
With admirable economy, the title Jetty announces two significant features of Talvikki Ansel's second book: the liminal vantage-point of the narrators of these poems and the curious ways in which the human world intersects with the natural.