Harvey was born in Germany and grew up in England and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She earned her B.A. from
Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the
Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at
Sarah Lawrence College. She is the sister of artist
Ellen Harvey and is married to editor Rob Casper. Harvey has served as the
poetry editor of
American Letters & Commentary as well as a contributing editor to
jubilat and
BOMB. She has published poems in literary magazines, including
The New Yorker,
The New Republic,
Slope,
Ploughshares, and
The American Poetry Review. Jeannine Hall Gailey described Harvey's
Modern Life, as "obsessed with devastated worlds and hybrid forms of life," and the two longest poems in the collection, the "Terror of the Future" and "The Future of Terror," as
abecedarian sequences that examine "the dysfunction between civilian and military populations in a stark, futuristic environment." Although Harvey has said that she "didn't set out to write political poems," but to explore "that idea of living in the middle of contradiction—in the grey area, between yes and no," the two poems were nonetheless acclaimed by
The New York Times as "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere . . . all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about 'political poetry.' " ==Published works==