Weems was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and attended public schools there. She earned her undergraduate degree in economics from
Wellesley College. She was one of the many female econ majors (FEMS) trained and mentored by the feminist economics professor at Wellesley,
Carolyn Shaw Bell, who enrolled in MBA programs and worked in executive jobs on Wall Street in unprecedented numbers beginning in the 1970s. Upon graduation from Wellesley, Weems worked for a short time for Coopers & Lybrand Public Accounting Firm and later as a broker for Merrill Lynch. After a brief stint on Wall Street, Weems sought a career in writing. Her earliest published writings appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s in
Essence and
Ms. magazines, and in black feminist journals like
Sage and
Conditions V. The 1970s was a defining year in black women's literary production from the literary writings of up-and-coming writers like
Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker,
Ntozake Shange, and
Gayle Jones to the monthly columns and personal lifestyle writing appearing in magazines like
Essence to the serious black feminist literary writings by
Audre Lorde,
Barbara Smith, and
Michelle Wallace. Weems was greatly influenced by this era of black women's literature and was living in New York at a time which she said gave her a front row seat to the lively and generative conversations taking place within feminist literary circles at the time about women's equality and black women's survival. Weems has been deeply impacted by and involved in the black church throughout her life. She considers it her life's mission to find ways to strike a balance between her political views and her spiritual values, her feminist/womanist consciousness with religious faith, her thirst for justice with her hunger for spiritual fulfillment. She enrolled in seminary in 1980. She earned her master's degree in 1983 and later her Ph.D. in 1989 from
Princeton Theological Seminary. She was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Old Testament Studies. Her expectation was that after completing her M.Div. degree she would like the men in her class to be hired in some area of full-time parish ministry but when church doors remained closed to her because she was a woman, she had to come up with a Plan B. Becoming a scholar and professor was not something she had considered, but an Old Testament professor and an influential figure in the
Biblical theology movement,
Bernhard W. Anderson, and also
Katherine M. O'Connor, who served as his teaching assistant at the time, convinced her she had a future in Old Testament studies. She decided to pursue a doctorate degree in biblical studies. Weems' doctoral dissertation title was "Sexual Violence as an Image for Divine Retribution in Prophetic Writings". Old Testament professors
Patrick D. Miller and
Katherine Sakenfeld were her dissertation advisors. == Career ==