"[2] Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967, Hoffman grew up in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989.
[5] Writing in The Independent, Boyd Tonkin called it "a remarkable book… A triumph of personal empathy and historical insight and a beacon for anyone who believes that ‘more joins than separates us.’"[6] A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation fellow,[7] Hoffman is married to MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole, and in 2011, she and Cole published a book they wrote together, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken /Nextbook), which has been widely praised, with Harold Bloom calling it "a small masterpiece"[8] and The Nation describing it as "a literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller, but with all the chiseled elegance and flashes of linguistic surprise we associate with poetry... Sacred Trash has made history both beautiful and exciting.
a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be,"[13] In 2019 Yale University Press brought out Hoffman's Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures as part of their Jewish Lives series.
[14] Booklist gave the book a starred review and called it a "precise and lively portrait... Each phase in Hecht's adventures is electrifying ... Hoffman's concentrated biography is smartly entertaining and revelatory.
"[17] The book was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography and was named one of the best paperbacks of 2020 by the Sunday Times, which dubbed it "a revelation.
[21] Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Middlebury College, and in 2009 was the Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.