Mark Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, attended the Universities of Kansas and New Mexico, and since 1968 has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he also served as the first coordinator of the university's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.
His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he is the author of six chapbook collections of poems as well as the full length collections Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls (prose poems), Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities (the last two in collaboration with photographer Wayne Gudmundson). He edited the poetry journal Dacotah Territory during the 70s and since then has been editor for Dacotah Territory Press, which has published a number of short collections by writers in the region. He is also the co-editor of several anthologies, including Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life; Beyond Borders: New Writing from Manitoba, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas; Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest; Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest; The Party Train: An Anthology of North American Prose Poetry; and The Talking of Hands: Unpublished Writing by New Rivers Press Authors.
A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, he has also won the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices competition, Milkweed Editions’ "Seeing Double" competition, six Pen Syndicated Fiction awards, and three Minnesota Book Awards. In the spring of 2005, Larry Woiwode named him an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.