Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.

Her memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in June 2025.

She has published two novels, her debut Salt Houses (2017), is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonists' City (2021).

Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry; Four Cities (2015); Hijra (2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019); and The Moon That Turns You Back (2024).

She co-edited the poetry anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023) with poet Zeina Hashem Beck.

Alyan has also been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines including The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Guernica, Jewish Currents,The New York Times Book Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review.

Alyan is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. She resides in Brooklyn with her family.