Ally Acker was born in New York City in 1954. She received a dual MFA in poetry and filmmaking in 1987 from Columbia University. Ms. Acker is the recipient of the Chester H. Jones Foundation Award, the Carl Sandburg Centennial Contest, and the Garden Street Press Prize which published her first collection of poems. Ally Acker is also the author of Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present, hailed by critic Judith Crist as "groundbreaking" in the field of film history. Derived from Reel Women, Acker produced and directed ten award winning documentaries on pioneering women in film.
Acker's poems have appeared in MS, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Sojourner, The American Voice and The Southwest Review among other publications. Acker's second collection of poems, Waiting for the Beloved, was published by Valentine Publishing Group in 1999.