Deborah Burnham was born in Huntington, West Virginia, on March 7, 1948. She began her scholarly pursuits in history and literature at the College of Wooster in Ohio. However, Burnham craved city life; to her, the city was a “shaping place.” After living in the quiet and rural Lake Erie area of Ohio, Seeking the energy of city life, Burnham moved to Philadelphia to pursue a PhD in Modern British and American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded a full scholarship.

Inspired by Theodore Roethke, a poet and professor of English at Penn State from 1936 to 1943, Burnham decided to analyze his poetry in her dissertation. Burnham had been pondering how to read Roethke's work since she was eighteen. After coming across a blurry photocopied image of one of Roethke's original handwritten manuscripts, Burnham initially decided to look at his printed works, since sorting through his scrawl could prove difficult. However, when she looked at the microfilms of his journals, she discovered "his handwriting was as clear as an elementary school teacher's."

After this discovery, Burnham interpreted the work from Roethke's own hand. His journals revealed how Roethke had made himself a better poet by effort and practice. This research gave Burnham a new outlook on her own poetry, confirming her sense that poetry "is not a machine." Burnham, who had always been interested in the genesis of a poem, found that the way Roethke pushed himself—"[teaching] himself to write poetry" by trial and error—fascinated her. This fed her interest in composition and nurtured the growth of her own writing.

In 1995, Dr. Burnham won the Texas Tech University Press Poetry Award for her collection of poems, Anna and the Steel Mill. This book illustrates what she defines as her genre: "meditative poetry" as part of the "main-stream narrative." One of the best-known poems from this collection is "Spare Change":

Crossing Spruce Street, I was bending like a peddler
under my laundry and three loaves of day-old bread.
She held her sleeping daughter, asked for change for milk,
and diapers to soak up what the baby couldn't use.
I'd spent my change on laundry tokens, flat imitations
Rattling in my hand. I offered bread; she needed cash;
we stared at the broken street, as if we hoped to see
a tale spread with laundered white, with knives and baskets
ready for the strong bread that, broken open,
would release a blessing in the smell of yeast.

Burnham says she does not "write about [mortality] as a long painful thing," as many writers and poets do today. Describing herself as a “glass half-full kind of person,” Burnham allows this optimism to shape her poetic tone. She defines her poems as "straight-forward" because after many years of academic writing she holds clarity as a value.

Burnham's poem "Fire in the Onion Field" was selected for publication by the Public Poetry Project of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book in 2002. She is a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and her 2008 chapbook Still was a runner-up for the 2007 Keystone Chapbook Prize awarded by Seven Kitchens Press.

At the University of Pennsylvania, she has directed the University Scholars Program and served as an Assistant Dean in the College Advising Office. For over twenty summers, she also directed and taught in the Creative Writing program at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts (PGSA). In addition, she has led a Writing Life workshop for cancer patients and the Abramson Cancer Center as a volunteer since its inception in 2015 (Kane, “Healing Words”).

Burnham served as the Associate Undergraduate Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She taught courses in American and British fiction, gender studies, poetry, and nonfiction writing for several decades. During her tenure, she created a freshman seminar on Philadelphia Poetry to introduce the lively poetic culture of the city to new students. Her teaching and advising have been recognized by the Penn English Undergraduate Advisory Board, Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and Provost's Award for Teaching Excellence. She has also been a member of the poetry board for the literary magazine Philadelphia Stories. 

Burnham lived in the Powelton neighborhood of Philadelphia for over twenty-five years. An enthusiastic gardener, she has created several small gardens on Philadelphia streets, most notably near the Irongate Theater at 37th and Chestnut Street. Now retired, Burnham “recently moved from Philadelphia to a small town—a lovely place, though she misses trains, buses, and sidewalks” (“Poetry Moment”).