Maxine Scates was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a working-class housing tract a mile from LAX. She worked her way through college, graduating from California State University, Northridge, where she took classes from and was encouraged by the poet Ann Stanford. After graduation, she moved to Eugene, Oregon where she earned an MFA from the University of Oregon.

Her fourth collection of poetry, My Wilderness, was published in October 2021, from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Maxine is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Undone (New Issues), which was a finalist for the Green Rose Prize; Black Loam (Cherry Grove Collections), which received the Lyre Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She is the co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon).