B.T. Shaw was born and raised in central Ohio, near her great-grandparents' homestead. She graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelor of science degree in journalism and spent her early career covering politics and the environment for a daily paper in Jacksonville, N.C. In 1999, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Washington, where she was a Jacob Javits fellow. A 2002 grant from Literary Arts helped her finish her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart, which was published by Eastern Washington University Press and won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. After 14 years editing the Poetry column for The Oregonian and teaching in Portland, Oregon, she is moving to HCMC/Saigon, Vietnam, where she will finish a poetry collection based on her experiences as a journalist near Camp Lejeune.