Alice Hoffman was a Mirrelees Fellow at Stanford University, where she received an MA in creative writing. Her first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one while she was studying at Stanford and was published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She has since published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and adults.

Hoffman received the 2020 Dayton Peace Prize for fiction, the Jewish Book Clube Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for her novel about the Holocaust, The World That We Knew. Her teen novel, Incantation, a story about Jewish life during the Spanish Inquisition was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year, and Toni Morrison called The Dovekeepers, her novel about Masada, “.. a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Hoffman is also the author of the Practical Magic series.

Hoffman is on the board of the literary magazine Ploughshares where she is the originator of the Hoffman Prize for fiction. She is also the founder of the Alice Hoffman Writing Workshop for teens at Adelphi University, and is one of the founders of the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Her most recent novel, The Invisible Hour, published in the summer of 2023, follows the legacy of Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter.