Andrea Budy was born in Berlin, Germany, to American parents and raised in the United States. She earned a BS in English and education from Boston University and an MA in comparative literature and oral interpretation from the University of Colorado. Her poetry collections include the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize–winning House without a Dreamer (1993), The Other Life (2001), and Woman in the Painting (2006). Budy is also the editor of the anthology When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (2009).
Budy has won two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry. A resident of Arkansas, she has been writer-in-residence at Lyon College since 1991.