Hawkey’s wry and expansive poems take a postmodern approach as they interrogate how we construct the self. His poetry collections include The Book of Funnels (2004) and Citizen Of (2007), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His cross-genre, multimedia book Ventrakl (2010) explores the work and life of poet Georg Trakl, an Austrian Expressionist, through layers of image, text, imagined Q&A, and conceptual translation. Karla Kelsey said, “This book manages to be at the same time an overheard emotional utterance that comes from a particularly felt subjective location (that is to say, the lyric as conventionally described) and a discourse on language, identity, politics, and the making of life and of art.”

Hawkey has translated the work of contemporary German poets Sabine Scho, Steffen Pop, and Daniel Falb, and has collaborated with German poet Uljana Wolf to translate the work of Austrian poet Ilse Aichinger. Hawkey’s own work has been translated into several languages.

In 2000, Hawkey co-founded the literary journal jubilat. In 2012 he founded, with Rachel Levitsky, the Office of Recuperative Strategies, a research-oriented collective of activists that explores new tactics to promote the reuse, perversification, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena.His honors include awards from the Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets, as well as a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award and a DAAD Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn.