Born in 1954, David Hinton's translations from Chinese include Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yun (New Directions, 2001), Mencius (1999), The Analects of Confucius (1998), Chuang Tzu: Inner Chapters (1997), Forms of Distance by Bei Dao (1994), The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien (1993), and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (1989).

In 1997 he was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his three volumes published in 1996: The Selected Poems of Lí Po and Bei Dao's Landscape Over Zero (both published by New Directions), and The Late Poems of Meng Chiao (Princeton). His other recent honors include fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014, he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He is also the author of three works of prose, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape (Shambhala Publications, 2017), Existence: A Story (Shambhala Publications, 2016), and Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape (Shambhala Publications, 2012), and the map-poem, Fossil Sky (Archipelago Books, 2004). His newest collection of poetry, Desert, is forthcoming from Shambhala Publications in July, 2018.

He teaches at Columbia University.