A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science, Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including most recently Ledger (Knopf/Bloodaxe, 2020). Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award and named “best book of the year” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times (UK); After (2006) was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Award, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Asking: New & Selected Poems will appear in 2023 in the US from Knopf, and in 2024 in the UK From Bloodaxe Books.

She is the author as well of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry's infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The TLS, The Guardian, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been translated into over fifteen languages. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.