She co-founded Five Trees Press, an award-winning literary press in San Francisco, and in the 1980s she was poetry acquisitions editor at The Lapis Press, Santa Monica, the press established by the abstract-expressionist painter Sam Francis. She also worked as an editor with the late museum director and art scholar, Dr. Pontus Hulten. She writes text for both musical and visual settings. With her first musical collaborator, composer Peter Josheff, she premiered the one-act chamber opera Inferno , June 2009 in Berkeley, California. She is currently working with Ann Callaway, and their one-act opera about Nabokov's love of butterflies, Vladimir in Butterfly Country , was performed in 2013.

For two years she designed and installed several visual projects with Exegesis, a poetry performance and installation collective, at the University of Exeter.

Robles was editor and publisher of Five Fingers Press and Woodland Editions. Her work is in collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; The Beinecke Library, Yale University; The Bender Room, University of San Francisco; Columbia University; and Harvard University, among others. She has received publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. Her writing has been published in numerous magazines.

Jaime Robles has taught editing and book arts at New College of California, Naropa University in Boulder, San Francisco State University, Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, and the University of San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Exeter.