Phoenix grew up in the Pacific Northwest and attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she received her bachelor's degree in creative writing. She later studied memoir writing through the University of Washington, attended the New York State Summer Writers Workshop taught by renowned essayist, Phillip Lopate, and in 2013 was accepted into Columbia University School of the Arts MFA program in nonfiction writing. After completing coursework for her MFA, Phoenix began taking classes at WWW to generate material for her master's thesis. She found the classes and community of writers so beneficial to her success as a writer that she continued taking classes after completing her thesis and began teaching memoir writing workshops upon graduation from Columbia in 2017.