Edgar Garcia was born in California to a family of Central American extraction. He earned an associate degree from Chaffey Community College, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Yale University. He is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. He also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing, where he serves as director of Undergraduate Studies.

Garcia's collection of poems and anthropological essays, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, won the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award. He is also the author of the chapbook Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012) and the coeditor of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2017), as well as a collaborator on Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021). His other books include a scholarly monograph, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and a collection of essays, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His poems and translations have appeared in the Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fence, Jacket2, Mandorla, Portable Gray, and the anthology The Alteration of Silence: Recent Chilean Poetry (Diálogos, 2013); and his essays on poetry and related topics have appeared in American Religion, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE, Modern Philology, New Writing, PMLA, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, he was the guest editor in chief of Fence magazine.