Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia, and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She worked for almost thirty-five years for the Minnesota Legislature. Trained as a medievalist and linguist, she holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota. Though she wrote poems as a young person, she largely left creative writing during the decades when she did scholarly work, took care of a family, and worked full time.

Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Writer's Almanac, and many other venues in print and online, as well as the anthologies Hot Sonnets, The Able Muse Anthology, The Best of The Barefoot Muse, Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer's, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. She has been a several-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee; a finalist for the 2009 Morton Marr Prize, the 2010 Best of the Net anthology, the 2011 Able Muse Book Prize, the 2014 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the 2016 Able Muse Book Prize, and the 2016 Hollis Summers Prize; and a winner of the Lyric Memorial Award, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She is the author of five books of poetry and two chapbooks. One of her poems is included in The Best American Poetry 2018.

She also reviews for several magazines, including Contemporary Poetry Review,The Raintown Review, Eclectica, The Arts Fuse, and Literary Matters.

She is married to John Corbett, a teacher of mathematics and statistics. They have two grown children.