Born in Campbell River, B.C. and partially raised in Sointula, Angela Bowering attended UBC, University of Calgary and Concordia. She received her M.A. from Simon Fraser University. She married SFU professor and author George Bowering. Having produced an appreciation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook for Shirley Neuman and Smaaro Kamboureli's A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (NeWest Press, 1987), she was prompted by Neuman to publish Figures Cut in Sacred Ground: Illuminati in The Double Hook (NeWest Press, 1988), a literary criticism of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. "The most important thing about this book," she wrote, "is that someone should have written about the novel much earlier, at more length, and better than I've done here. Maybe it will help other people to do it in more helpful and beautiful ways."

Angela Bowering is also credited as the co-author of an experimental novelette called Piccolo Mondo (Coach House Books, 1998, 1-55245-966-7) written with George Bowering, Michael Matthews and David Bromige. It begins, "The first thing you need to keep in mind if you're going to write a novel about the 1950s, which began in 1951 and ended in 1963, is the multitude of stuff that hasn't happened yet. I mean no Sixties (1963-73), no Seventies (1974-79), no Eighties (1980-1992). We're sitting in the Georgia, and as far as the mini goes we're tabulae rasae. John, Paul, George are in Hamburg but we're in the cellar in Vancouver - and what is Vancouver? An overgrown small town, more wood than brick, more brick than concrete, the laws are so blue we can't be sitting there on a Sunday, and unless we've found a female over twenty-one to get us into the Ladies & Escorts side of the beer parlour, to meet other females, why, we're sitting in a space that's strictly men only."

[BCBW 2003]