Nina Bogin was born in New York City and grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She attended Kirkland College (now Hamilton College) and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976, first in Paris and then in eastern France near the Swiss and German borders, in the foothills of the Vosges mountains.

She taught English and literature at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard, France, until her retirement in 2017.  She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1989 and published her first book of poems, In the North (Graywolf Press) that same year. Two books of poems followed, The Winter Orchards in 2001 and The Lost Hare in 2012, both published by Anvil Press. In 2013, CB Editions published The Illiterate, her translation of L’Analphabète, a collection of autobiographical texts by the Hungarian-Swiss author Agota Kristof.