Pattiann Rogers is best known for her poetry. In The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation (1999), a work of prose studded with poetry, Rogers describes the aims of her most admired verse and suggests how and why she writes. The book was published by Milkweed Editions as part of its Credo series, which explores the techniques, interests, and goals of contemporary American writers whose work focuses on natural history and the idea of place.

Pattiann Rogers has received many awards and honors, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest in 1981, and Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry in 1991 and 2005. Firekeeper was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize offered by the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding poetry collection published in the United States in 1994 and received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Song of the World Becoming, which contains all her previously published collections and includes forty new poems, was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Individual poems have been awarded the Bess Hokin Prize (1982) and the Frederick Bock Prize (1998) from Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize from Poetry Northwest (1981), five Pushcart Prizes, and publication in The Best American Poetry of 1996, as well as in Best Spiritual Writing in 1999, 2000, and 2001. In 2004, she served as a judge for the National Poetry Series. She was also awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy.