Born in 1955 in Austin, Texas, Conoley grew up in Taylor, a nearby farming community. Conoley holds a BA in Journalism from Southern Methodist University and an MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts. Her earlier work (Some Gangster Pain, Tall Stranger) contained more straight-forward narratives and was resonant with the desperado atmospherics of Conoley's native state. The next four books became more and more linguistically inventive, without ever entirely abandoning narrative.

In Profane Halo, Conoley takes her title from the Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures and creatures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning. Post-allegorical, post-apocalyptic, these poems continue Conoley’s exploration into the impossible questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. As Barbara Guest says of the book, "Out of the old beliefs a new language speaks. We said this yesterday, and today the words are stronger. I am taken by surprise by the wit and jeopardy, by the way an ending is avoided on the surface of the book’s meaning. I am excited by the triumph of this writing." Rain Taxi says of her work: "All the pleasures and dangers of the work achieve a brilliant suspension, like particles of dust in air a time-stopping grace in quantum improvisations of form."

Her most recent collection, The Plot Genie (2009), takes its title from a 1930s writer's aid used by pulp fiction writers and screen writers alike. In this work, a murky underworld is constantly created and recreated, peopled by hapless characters waiting to be “dialed up” and sent along multiple and fragmentary narratives. Conoley's The Plot Genie includes characters of her own invention, contemporary film actors stripped of their veneer by the rapid, shape-shifting powers of the plot genie, and characters from other, older texts, such as Frankenstein. In this book the plot genie itself becomes a character, a force neither fully in charge nor culpable, much like our leaders or guides today.

Conoley is currently translating some work of the French poet Henri Michaux, works which have yet to brought forth into English.

Conoley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to the crime novelist Domenic Stansberry.

Her honors and awards include four Pushcart Prize publications, a Fund for Poetry Award, the Academy of American Poets Award, a fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, residency at the MacDowell Colony and a grant from Northwest Institute for Advanced Study.