Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry collections include, The NeverField; The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award; and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is "a book that trembles with belonging (and longing)." Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía (University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2012) is "a unique recreation, in reverse, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, considered one of the most significant books ever published about New York City." Alice Walker lauds Handal’s work as "poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve." She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, the AE Ventures Fellowship, an Honored Finalist for the 2009 Gift of Freedom Award, and was shortlisted for New London Writers Awards and The Arts Council of England Writers Awards. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes: "This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders."

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetrywales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Crab Orchard Review, and The Literary Review; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has read her poetry worldwide, and has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR Radio as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo. She has been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twenty theatrical or film productions worldwide, most recently her work was produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre, and Westminster Abbey in London. Ed Ochester writes, "If there is such a thing as a Renaissance figure among younger poets writing in America, that person is Nathalie Handal."

She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the editing of the groundbreaking The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and the co-editing along with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar of the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co). Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer writes: "Assembled here not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature."

Handal received an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College, a Master of Philosophy in Drama and English from the University of London, and has studied contemporary literature in Russia, France, and Spain. She teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, most recently in Africa, and as Picador Guest Professor, Leipzig University, Germany. She is Books Review Editor and Tutor for Sable Literary Magazine and Forum, United Kingdom; an Executive Board Member for Palfest; a Member of the Laboratory of Frontiers Studies at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil; and an Advisory Board Member for The Center for Literary Translation, and The Levantine Center, Los Angeles. She is currently a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College. Handal writes the blog-column, The City and The Writer, for Words without Borders magazine.