Angie Estes is the author of seven previous books of poems, most recently Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Edition Press, 2025). Her book, Enchantée, won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, and Tryst was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A collection of essays devoted to Estes's work appears in the University of Michigan Press "Under Discussion" series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry (2019).

The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. In 2023, she was a Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the James Merrill House.