Like many creative people, Mark Strand dabbled in a variety of professions before settling on poetry, writing, and teaching.

He was born in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. He attended college first at Antioch College, where he earned a B.A. He followed that with a BFA from Yale University, specializing in the study of painting. He then ventured farther afield geographically, by attending and earing an M.A. at the University of Iowa. His mentor and advisor there was the poet Donald Justice.

He then was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for study in Italy. Upon his return he taught at Iowa University for three years, and in 1965 became a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Brazil. During his time there he was much informed and influenced by Latin American poets. Upon his return to the United States, Strand pursued a teaching career at a number of prominent universities. He has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and at the University of Utah, where he taught for a number of years. Since 2005 he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.

His first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open, was published early in his career, and by the time his second book, Reasons for Moving, was published in 1968, he had begun to gather the attention of critics, who praised him for his quiet irony and finely-tuned understanding of inner language.

Some critics view Strand's work as evocative of Edward Hopper's paintings. He often employs surrealism and dreamlike language in his poetry. Perhaps Mexican poet Octavio Paz has said it best, "Mark Strand has chosen the negative path, with loss as the first step towards fullness: it is also the opening to a transparent verbal perfection."

Strand, naturally, took inspiration from his mentor, Donald Justice. This is evident in remarks made by Strand, including his reference to Justice's work. He stated, "If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of life, the poem for Justice is an act of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival."

With regard to his own writing and writing in general, Strand has stated that he writes "to participate in the delusion of my own immortality which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistance irresistable."Strands honors and awards include the Bollingen Prize, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. Most prominently, he was named Poet Laureate by the United States Library of Congress in 1990.