Barbara Hamby's third collection of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the Associated Writing Programs' Donald Hall Prize. It will be published in 2004 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Her second collection, The Alphabet of Desire, won the 1998 New York University Press Prize in Poetry and was published in April 1999 by NYU Press. It was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 1999. Rita Dove chose a poem from this book for Best American Poetry 2000. Another poem from the book was in the 2001 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Her first full-length book of poems, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.
 
Ms. Hamby is also the author of two chapbooks of poems, Skin (1995 Gerald Cable Chapbook Prize) and Eating Bees.

She has received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and three individual artist fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Southern Review and The Yale Review. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.