Bill Knott spent most of his youth in Chicago. He also taught poetry at Columbia College in Chicago in the early 1970s.
His first book was The Naomi Poems, published in 1968, under the pseudonym Saint Giraud. His many books of poetry include Auto-necrophilia, Love Poems To Myself, Rome in Rome, The Quicken Tree, Selected and Collected Poems, and Laugh At the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. He is currently an associate professor of English at Emerson College in Boston.
In recent years, he has several times made all of his collected poems available for free online.