Will graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with a degree in English in 1987. After a period outside academia, he took the Literature, Culture, Modernity MA at Queen Mary, University of London, receiving the Marjorie Thompson award for outstanding academic achievement in 1999. He remained at Queen Mary for his AHRB-funded PhD, which was devoted to the writing of contemporary American poet Susan Howe. He subsequently taught poetry, modernist literature and critical theory at Queen Mary and at Southampton University. In January 2007 he joined Royal Holloway as RCUK research fellow in contemporary poetry and poetics. He is a member of the department's Poetics Research Centre and was a co-organizer of that group's POLYply| reading and performance series.

His book publications include The Poetry of Susan Howe| (Palgrave, 2010), and two co-edited essay collections: Frank O'Hara Now| (co-edited with Robert Hampson, Liverpool UP, 2010), and Writing the Field Recording: Sound, Word Environment (co-edited with Stephen Benson, Edinburgh UP, 2018). A study of short form in modernist and contemporary US poetry is forthcoming with Edinburgh UP in 2020. Will has also released several CDs of field recordings, sound art and music. An album of collaborative audio work made with the poet Carol Watts is to be released in 2020.

Will currently teaches EN1112 An Introduction to Poetry; EN2325 Modernist Literature; EN3232 The First Person (a course radical memoir and biofiction co-taught with Prue Chamberlain-Bussey); EN3332 The New York Schools (an interdisciplinary course on mid-century poetry, painting and composition).