Annie Finch was born on October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle, New York. Her family background on both sides included artists, intellectuals, and political activists, a number of whom published poetry. Her maternal great-aunt, Jessie Wallace Hughan, was a founder of the War Resisters League. Her mother, a poet and doll artist, served as president of the National Institute of American Doll Artists. Her father was a Conscientious Objector during World War II before beginning his career as a scholar of pre-Socratic philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College. In the introduction to "The Body of Poetry," Finch claims that her parents met at a lecture by Auden, and her essay "Desks" describes the influences of her father's book collection and her mother's example as a poet.

Finch graduated from Oakwood Friends' School, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1973 and then studied filmmaking, art, and poetry at Bard College at Simon's Rock before earning her B.A. in English Literature at Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1979. Her most influential teachers at Yale included medievalists Marie Borroff and Fred Robinson, poet and prosodist John Hollander, and prosodist Penelope Laurans. In 1983 she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, writing her Masters thesis — a trilogy of mythic verse dramas in meter — under the supervision of playwright Ntozake Shange. Finch then entered the graduate program in English and American literature at Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1990 under the supervision of literary scholar and Anne Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook.

Finch self-published her first book of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, in 1982. It has since been reissued by Salt Publishing. Her subsequent books of poetry include Eve (1997), Calendars (2003), and the "narrative libretto" Among the Goddesses (2009). In 1997 she founded WOM-PO: Discussion of Women's Poetry. She is married to the environmental organizer Glen Brand and they have two children. In 2004 she moved to Maine, where she is currently Professor of English and Director of Stonecoast MFA Program, the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine.

In an article in Contemporary Authors, published two years before her first full-length book of poetry, Finch made a remark that anticipates the focus of her career: "To me, poetic form, with its unverbal, physical power, is radically important in reconnecting us with our human roots and rediscovering our intimacy with nature . . .. rhythmic formal poetry is of great value in celebrating, commemorating, and cementing the bonds of community." As Claire Keyes notes in the entry on Finch in Scribner's American Writers, "A strong current in her work is the decentering of the self, a theme which stems from her deep connection with the natural world and her perception of the self as part of nature."

While Finch has remained consistently interested in formal poetics since the early 1990s, from the outset much in her work has differentiated her from the movement called "New Formalism." Henry Taylor wrote in a review of Eve, "while much would seem to align her with the so-called new formalists, Finch cheerfully ignores many of their stated principles" by not writing about contemporary life and forgoing a "natural" idiom. In all her books but especially in Calendars, which was reissued in 2008 with a "Readers Companion" that offers sample scansions of fifteen separate meters used in the book and a long list of formal structures, Finch exemplifies her own invented terms "metrical diversity," "an exaltation of forms," and "multiformalism." In a blog for the Poetry Foundation, "Listening to Poetry,", she writes, "A friend asked me a few months ago, as I was discussing one of the poems I had been writing, “does it ever depress you, thinking that most people won’t know what you are doing with meter?” Maybe it should depress me, but honestly, it doesn’t. Meter just gives me too much joy for me to worry too much about it. . . . Meter is like music; you can enjoy it whether or not you understand why, and you can easily enjoy poems in meter by reading aloud to yourself, even if you are only used to reading free verse. . . . Meanwhile, just in case, my publisher is busy producing an audio version of my book on CD."

Such statements, along with Poetry Foundation blog essays on such topics as "Occasioning Occasional Poetry" and "Where Are You, General Audience?," imply that one of Finch's goals is to appeal to a wider audience for poetry. Yet s good part of the critical interest attracted by Finch's poetry has also come from the avant-garde end of the poetic spectrum. Finch's first book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, was re-published by the innovative British publisher Salt Publishing, whose website describes it as "an early experimental work . . .a performance poem for soul-voice and attendant daemons." The book carries an endorsement by exploratory poet Jennifer Moxley claiming that it anticipates Stacey Dorris, and the book's longest review appears in the avant-garde-leaning journal Jacket. Her third book of poetry, Calendars, was compared in a review by Ron Silliman to the work of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer..

In an interview with New Formalist poet R.S. Gwynn, Finch has remarked, "When I teach contemporary poetry, I divide it into four tendencies: formalist, oral tradition-performance, mainstream free verse, and experimental. I feel lucky to have encountered firsthand so many influences from these four divergent kinds of poetry. In my own work, I like to think, these different approaches have united to bring me back full-circle, yet in a new way, to the poetry I loved first, and best, when I was young."