Warren's first collection of poetry, Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), received generally favorable notice in a review in The New York Times.

Her next collection, Stained Glass, won the Lamont Poetry Prize for the best second volume published in the U. S. in 1993; in his review, Jonathan Aaron described these poems "tough-minded, beautifully crafted meditations".

[3] In the 2008–09 academic year, Warren was a fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

[4] Warren is currently the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Her younger daughter, Chiara Scully, graduated from Yale University and is a psychiatric social worker whose poetry has been published in the Seneca Review[citation needed][relevant?]