Weiner was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended Classical High School, until 1946, and then Radcliffe College. She graduated with a B.A. in 1950, with a dissertation on Henry James. Working in publishing and then in Bloomingdale's department store, she was married and then divorced after four years. Weiner started writing poetry in 1963 though her first chapbook, The Magritte Poems after Rene Magritte, was published in 1970. It is not indicative of her latter work, being "basically a New York School attempt to write verse in response to the paintings of Rene Magritte". During the sixties she also organised and participated in a number of happenings with other members of the New York art scene, where she had been living for some time. These included 'Hannah Weiner at Her Job', "a sort of open house hosted by her employer, A.H. Schreiber Co., Inc." and 'Fashion Show Poetry Event' with Eduardo Costa, John Perreault, Andy Warhol and others in a "collaborative and innovative enterprise that incorporated conceptual art, design, poetry and performance."

In the early 1970s, Weiner began writing a series of journals that were partly the result of her experiments with automatic writing and partly a result of her schizophrenia. She influenced a number of the language poets and was included in the In the American Tree anthology of Language poetry (edited by Ron Silliman). Beginning with Little Books/Indians (1980) and Spoke (1984) Weiner's work engaged with Native American politics, particularly the American Indian Movement and the case of imprisoned activist Leonard Peltier.

Interest in Weiner continues into the 21st century with the recent publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2007), "a representative selection spanning her decades of poetic output" This volume was edited by Patrick F. Durgin, who provides an overview of Weiner's art: