Hilberry was a professor of English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana from 1954 to 1961 and at Kalamazoo College from 1962 to 1998.
He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and won the Iowa Poets' Prize in 1989.
He was co-editor (with Michael Delp, and Herbert Scott) of the anthology Contemporary Michigan Poetry: Poems from the Third Coast (1988).
Hilberry is also the author of Luke Karamazov (1987), a nonfiction first person narrative of two brothers who were both multiple murderers.
His former student Annie Martin served as his editor at Wayne State University Press.