[1] In her time, the role of a female poet was to write elegies for the dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral competitions.

Her poetry was later recorded by Muslim scholars, who were studying unaltered Arabic of her time in order to explicate the language of early Islamic texts.

Al-Khansāʾ was born and raised in the Najd in the Arabian Peninsula into a wealthy family of the tribe of Sulaym, and was the daughter of the head of the al-Sharid clan.

Al-Khansāʾ mourned her two brothers' deaths in poetry, writing over a hundred elegies about the two of them alone,[3] and began to gain fame for her elegiac compositions, especially due to her powerful recitals.

"[8][9][10][11] Muhammad even rated al-Khansāʾ over Imru' al-Qais, the most famous poet of the classical Arabic tradition, as the one with greater poetic abilities.

(Arabic: الحمد لله الذي شرفني بقتلهم، وأرجو من ربي أن يجمعني بهم في مستقر رحمته).

The poems of al-Khansā’ are short and marked by a strong and traditional sense of despair at the irrevocable loss of life.