L.J. Valente grew up in Natick, Massachusetts. He attended Vanderbilt University School of Engineering. It was there that he began writing and left shortly after to pursue a writing career. After drifting around the US for several years, he found himself married to a Turkish national and living on the Aegean coast of Turkey. While in Turkey, he wrote for Cosmopolitan Magazine Turkey and worked as a translation editor for several publishing houses. In 2014, he returned to the United States and in 2015, he returned to literature. Since then he has published 21 collections of poetry and a collection of short stories.