Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of six books of poetry: Shadow of Heaven (2002, a finalist for the National Book Award), Kyrie (1995, winner of the Sara Teasdale Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award), Two Trees (1992), The Lotus Flowers (1987), and The Forces of Plenty (1983), all from W. W. Norton, and Claiming Kin (1976, Wesleyan). Her essays on writing have been collected in The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia, 1996); and she has co-edited both an anthology of craft essays by the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World (University of Michigan, 1996, with Gregory Orr) and an anthology of poetry, Hammer & Blaze (University of Georgia, 2002, with Heather McHugh).

Voigt developed and directed the first low-residency creative writing program in the country, at Goddard College (subsequently relocated to Warren Wilson College, where Voigt has continued to teach). She has also taught at numerous writers' conferences throughout the country and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writing Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a James Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She also recently completed a term as the Vermont State Poet.