Born in Glen Cove, New York on Long Island, Hecht attended Adelphi University. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University in 1995 and for a time studied at the Université de Caen, and the Université d’Angers. She currently teaches poetry and philosophy in the Graduate Writing Program of The New School and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

In 2002 her debut poetry collection The Next Ancient World received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as ForeWord Magazine's award for Poetry Book of the Year. Her second collection, Funny, won the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press.

In 2003 Hecht published two books of history and philosophy with two different publishers. The first, A History, is an epic, worldwide study of religious doubt throughout history. The other, The End of the Soul, is a profile of an unusual group of nineteenth-century French anthropologists who formed the Society of Mutual Autopsy to discover links between personality, ability and brain morphology. It received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for 2004 from the Phi Beta Kappa Society as a book that "is an important contribution to knowledge, serious scholarship with a broad pertinence to the human condition."

In 2007 Hecht published The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong in which she attempts to examine happiness through historical perspective. Hecht maintains that our current perception of happiness is affected by culture, and that future generations may well mock our view of happiness as we make fun of earlier generations.

History and philosophy

• 2003 Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France, 1876-1936 ... ISBN 0-231-12846-0
• 2003 A History ... ISBN 0-06-009795-7
• 2007 The Happiness Myth ... ISBN 0-06-081397-0

Periodicals

The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, French Historical Studies, and others.

Poetry

• 2001 The Next Ancient World ... ISBN 0-9710310-0-2
• 2005 Funny ... ISBN 0-299-21400-1

Collections

• Best American Poetry 2005, Paul Muldoon and David Lehman, eds. (Scribner's, 2005).
• Good Poems for Hard Times, Garrison Keillor, ed. (Viking/Penguin, 2005).
• Poetry Daily, Boller, Selby, and Yost, eds. (Sourcebooks, 2003).
• Good Poems, Garrison Keillor, ed. (Viking/Penguin, 2002).
• Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times, Joan Murray, ed. (Beacon, 2001).
• The Best American Poetry 1999, Robert Bly and David Lehman, eds. (Scribner's, 1999).

Periodicals

The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Partisan Review, Ms. Magazine, Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Salmagundi, Quarterly West, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, River City, and other journals.

Portuguese

• "Dúvida: uma História", 2005