Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of ongoing prose work, eleven chapbooks of poetry, and a three-volume boxed set collection of poetry, Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church (New Directions, 2021). He is editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017).
 
His awards and honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2015, the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome in 2016, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress in 2017, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.