Dara Wier was born in Louisiana in 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green University.

Wier is the author of nine collections of poetry: Reverse Rapture (2005), Hat on a Pond (2002), Voyages in English (2001), Our Master Plan (1998), Blue for the Plough (1992), The Book of Knowledge (1988), All You Have in Common (1984), The 8-Step Grapevine (1980), Blood, Hook & Eye (1977). She was a Phi Beta Kappa award finalist for Our Master Plan. In fall 2006, Wave Books will publish Remnants of Hannah, Wier's tenth book.

About her work, John Ashbery has said: “It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.”

The Harvard Review has said "Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier's colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence."

Her work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The American Poetry Review awarded her the Jerome Shestack Prize in 2001. She received a Pushcart prize in 2002, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA.

She directs the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and along with Noy Holland and Lisa Olstein co-directs the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.