Born in in western Pennsylvania and raised in the near suburbs of New York City, Alexandra Marshall did not grow up imagining herself as a writer. She studied modern dance at Wheaton College and The New England Conservatory and graduated with a BA in French from Wheaton in 1965. As a teacher of creative writing, she has offered courses at the Harvard Extension School and to graduate students at Emerson College. In 1989, she and James Carroll founded the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar with Robie Macauley and Pamela Painter, which was held for nine years at Emerson’s Kasteel Well in The Netherlands.