Andrea Hollander Budy was born in Berlin, Germany (of American parents), raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey, and educated at Boston University and the University of Colorado. Since 1977 she has lived in the Ozark Mountains near Mountain View, Arkansas, in a house her husband, Todd, designed and built. Together with their now-grown son, Brooke, they restored and worked as owner-innkeepers of the Wildflower Bed & Breakfast for fifteen years. Since 1991 Budy has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Her full-length poetry collections are Woman in the Painting, The Other Life, and House Without a Dreamer, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Other awards include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, the Runes Poetry Prize, the Ellipsis Poetry Award, the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, the WORDS Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan Writers' Conferences.

Budy has published more than 200 poems and essays in such literary journals as Crazyhorse, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and Sou'wester, which published a special feature on Budy, including an interview, in its spring 2003 issue.

Her work also appears in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks, including Writing Poems; Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems; and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.

Budy has served as Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah; the University of Burgundy (France); the University of Sussex (England); and St Bede's School (England). She has also taught at writers' conferences, workshops, and institutes, including the White River Writers' Workshop, which she directed; the Oklahoma Arts Institute; the Taos Summer Writers' Conference; and Poetry OtherWise at Emerson College in England.

Andrea has been interviewed on National Public Radio, and her work has been featured by Garrison Keillor on his radio program, The Writer's Almanac, and by former United States Poet Laureates Billy Collins in his Poetry 180 Internet course for high school students, Rita Dove in her Washington Post column, "Poet's Choice," and Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column, "American Life in Poetry."