Sophie Cabot Black was raised on a small farm in New England. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in 1980 and her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1984. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Fence, APR, Bomb, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Looking for Home: Women in Exile (Milkweed Editions), More Light: Father & Daughter Poems (Harvest Books/HBJ), and Best American Poetry 1993, ed: Louise Glück (Scribner/Collier Books).

In 1988 she received the Grolier Poetry Prize and was awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 1989 she received the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America; in 1990 the Emerging Poets Award from Judith's Room. The Misunderstanding of Nature, published by Graywolf Press, received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America for 1994.

Also among Black's other publications are translations of Latin American poets (in the anthologies You Can't Drown the Fire [Cleis Press, ed: Alicia Partnoy] and Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology [University of Texas, ed: Stephen Tapscott]). She also has essays in Wanting a Child (FSG, ed: Bialosky & Schulman), First Loves (Scribner, ed: Ciuraru) and one of her poems was used in a song on Akiko Yano's current album from Sony International. Most recently Black was a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, and she currently teaches at Columbia University.

Her second collection of poems, The Descent, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in September 2004.