Tanning published her first poetry collection at ninety-four and her second at a hundred and one. She called herself the oldest emerging poet. She had spent the previous seven decades as a painter and sculptor.

She was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1910 and left for New York at twenty with twenty-five dollars. Her painting Birthday (1942) is a self-portrait: bare-torsoed, standing beside an infinite row of open doors, with a winged creature at her feet. Max Ernst saw it when he visited her studio. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner. They lived first in Sedona, Arizona, then in Huismes, France, for decades. After Ernst died in 1976, she returned to New York.

She was published in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, as a poet. She also wrote a memoir (Birthday, 1986), a novel (Chasm: A Weekend, 2004), and a second memoir (Between Lives, 2001). She endowed the Wallace Stevens Award at the Academy of American Poets. She died in 2012, in her Manhattan home, aged a hundred and one.