He was born in Chicago and has lived in New York City, Paris and San Francisco.

Since 2004, he has lived in Lewes, Delaware, with his wife – the poet and psychotherapist Beth Joselow.

[a] Mandel was educated in Chicago's jazz and blues clubs (e.g. Theresa's, The Burning Spear and especially the Sutherland Lounge where he was a regular from his early teenage years) and at the University of Chicago, where he studied with philosophers Richard McKeon and Hannah Arendt, novelist Saul Bellow, classicist and translator David Grene, and art critic Harold Rosenberg on the Committee on Social Thought.

He co-curated a reading series with Ron Silliman at the Grand Piano, a coffee house in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, continuing a series founded by Barrett Watten, and edited and published six issues of the magazine MIAM.

Mandel is a co-author of The Grand Piano, an experiment in collective autobiography by ten San Francisco language poets.