Wagner lived in Asia and the Middle East until 1977, when her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland.She graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Iowa (MFA, 1994), and University of Utah (PhD, 2000).

She teaches at Miami University. in Oxford, Ohio.

Her work has appeared in 1913, Verse, Plantarchy, Big Bell, Black Clock, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Electronic Poetry Review, Fence, Five Fingers Review, Fourteen Hills, The Gig, The Hat, How2, New Review, Shearsman, Soft Targets, and Textsound, and in the anthologies Poets on Teaching, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, Gurlesque, State of the Union: 50 Political Poems, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, and The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800 to the Present, among others.

She has lived with her ex-husband, the poet Martin Corless-Smith, and their son Ambrose, in Boise, Idaho and London, England.

Poetry

• "My What to Replace My"; "Who Admitted You?"; "An Hendy Hap"; "There Was a Place in the Brain, a Red Knot"; "The Divinity of Man", Boston Review, December 2001/January 2002
• Delirious Hem/Dusie Delirious Adventskalendar, December 2009

• My New Job. New York: Fence Books, 2009
• Macular Hole. New York: Fence Books, 2004

Chapbooks

• Bornt. Miniature handmade chapbook. Schaffhausen, Switzerland: Dusie Press, 2009.
• Articulate How. Washington, DC: Big Game Books, 2008.
• Hole in the Ground. Oxford, OH: Slack Buddha Press, 2008.
• Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large. Letterpress. Fort Collins, CO: Bonfire Press, 2007.
• Imitating. London: Leafe Press, 2004.
• Exercises. New York: 811 Books, 2004.
• Hotel Faust. Sheffield/Cheltenham, England: West House Books/Gratton Street Irregulars, 2001.
• Boxes. Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books (now Mindmade Books, 2001).
• Fraction Anthems. New York: 811 Books, 1999.

Criticism

• Review of Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, Chicago Review, Winter 2007
• Selection of and commentary on previously unpublished poems by Barbara Guest, Chicago Review Barbara Guest issue

Editing