Heather McHugh (born August 20, 1948) is an American poet notable for Dangers, To the Quick, Eyeshot and Muddy Matterhorn.

McHugh was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the US and a Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She taught for thirty years at the University of Washington in Seattle and held visiting chairs at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Syracuse, UCLA and elsewhere.

Another, "Glottal Stop: Poems by Paul Celan" co-authored with Nikolai B. Popov, won the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

[1] Then in 2011–2012, she started the nonprofit CAREGIFTED[2] to provide respite and tribute to long-term caregivers of the severely disabled and chronically ill. For her work there, she received notice from Encore.org's Purpose Prizes.

She was a Fellow at Cummington Community for the Arts in 1970, and entered graduate school at the University of Denver in 1971, having already published a poem in The New Yorker.

McHugh was the poet-in-residence at Stephens College in Missouri between 1974 and 1976; she worked as an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton between 1976 and 1982.

During the 1980s, McHugh worked a great deal on translation, partly due to her alliance with her co-translator and husband at that time, who also taught at the University of Washington.

This latter translation, entitled Glottal Stop: Poems by Paul Celan, would win the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Her skill in translating literature by Slavic writers became even more evident with the publication of Because the Sea Is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (1989) featuring the work of a Bulgarian poet and novelist.

One of Phillips's images, "A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel," from the collaboration is appropriately used on the cover of McHugh's essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993).

During this year, her poetry was anthologized in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, alongside poets laureate like Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky, and other contemporaries like Charles Wright, Lucille Clifton, James Tate, Philip Levine, and Marilyn Hacker.

About her role in guest editing Ploughshares in Spring 2001, McHugh writes, "The sheer syntactical elegance of many of these new poems suggests an instrumental refinement for which I'm grateful: I'm an old Richard Wilbur/Anthony Hecht fan, and have had reason now and then to regret, during my quarter century of teaching in M.F.A.

That same year, McHugh, with Nikolai Popov, received the first International Griffin Poetry Prize in translation for Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan.

In 2020, Copper Canyon Press published Mchugh's Muddy Matterhorn, a collection of poems from the previous decade, which the New York Times described as "a vortex of strangeness", where "high and low interchange in Dickinson-like reversals".