At the time of publishing Duty, Geraldine McKenzie was a teacher, living in the Blue Mountains area west of Sydney, New South Wales. Her poems and reviews have been published extensively in Australian and overseas journals, and in numerous anthologies. As well as the awards listed, she came equal first in the ars poetica poetry competition in 1997.

McKenzie was invited to be one of four participating local poets at a workshop given by Deb Westbury at Varuna Writers Centre, and her work appeared in a feature on innovative Australian women poets in the highly respected online journal for modernist women writers, How2. She was one of a number of Australian women poets invited to contribute to a forum on poetics in Meanjin. As an experienced reader she performed at a number of poetry venues including the Sydney Poetry Festival (where she also gave a paper on the Australian-American connection), the Melbourne Poetry Festival, Varuna Writers Centre, Collected Works (Melbourne), the Central Coast Festival and sculpture tours run by Macquarie University.

In April 2002 McKenzie visited New York for a week and gave two readings. She also read in London and at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. In 2003 she gave a paper on Line and Space at a forum at UTS, Sydney, and a paper on poetry and music at the conference held by the Mallarme-Brennan Association in Paris.