Leonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899. The fifth of six children. She was brought up in a strict home. She was not allowed to ride the subway until she was 18, and then only while her father accompanied her.

Leonie graduated from Barnard college in 1922. She began writing poetry as an undergraduate and had her first poems published in 1925. She lived in Paris in 1929 while on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In Paris she regularly visited Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein and lived with Allen Tate and his family.

She began teaching at NYU in 1930. In 1933, Leonie married William Troy and published another book of poetry. She published no poetry for the next 25 years and yet was elected to the Chair of Poetry of the Library of Congress (which would later be called the U.S. poet laureateship) in 1948. She published poems again in 1954. From1947 to 1968 she was a lecturer at Columbia University. Leonie Adams taught and lectured at several colleges over the years of her career and received numerous grants, awards and honors.

She died in 1988 in New Milford, Connecticut.