Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and British Columbia. Bringhurst studied architecture, linguistics, and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Utah. He holds a BA from Indiana University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

Bringhurst has taught literature, art history and history of typography at several universities and held fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Locally, Bringhurst has been criticized by Haida communities and their leaders for failing to acknowledge and spend time inside the Haida culture. There is also resentment around the covers of his translations, which feature his name. Traditionally Haida stories, songs, crests, and other intellectual property were considered more sacred than physical property. It was customary for the violation of intellectual property rights to result in corporeal punishment. Because of this controversy he has been accused of academic exploitation and cultural appropriation. These are often perceived by Haida communities as extensions of the colonial legacy.

Poetry

• The Shipwright's Log – 1972
• Cadastre – 1973
• Eight Objects – 1975
• Bergschrund – 1975
• Tzuhalem's Mountain – 1982
• The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82 – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award), 1985 (Copper Canyon Press)
• Tending the Fire – 1985
• The Blue Roofs of Japan – 1986
• Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music – 1986, 1987 (Copper Canyon Press)
• Conversations with a Toad – 1987
• The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995 – 1995
• Elements (with drawings by Ulf Nilsen) – 1995
• The Book of Silences – 2001
• Ursa Major – 2003 (shortlisted for the 2004 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize)
• New World Suite Number Three: A poem in four movements for three voices – 2006
• Selected Poems – 2009

Prose

• Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada (with Geoffrey James, Russel Keziere & Doris Shadbolt) – 1983
• Ocean/Paper/Stone – 1984
• The Raven Steals the Light (with Bill Reid) – 1984
• Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters – 1986
• The Black Canoe (with photographs by Ulli Steltzer) – 1991
• Boats Is Saintlier than Captains: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Morality, Language, and Design – 1997
• Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities – 1998
• A Short History of the Printed Word (with Warren Chappell) – 1999
• The Elements of Typographic Style – 1992, revised 1996, revised 2004, revised 2005
• The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning – 2004
• The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Lectures 2006
• Everywhere Being is Dancing 2007
• The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada – 2008

Translation

• A trilogy entitled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers:
• A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World – 1999 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
• Nine Visits to the Mythworld – (a reinterpretation of the stories of mythteller Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, as collected in 1900 by John Reed Swanton Northwest Coast Books: Nine Visits to the Mythworld) – 2000 (shortlisted for the 2001 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize)
• Being in Being: The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller - Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay – 2002
• Parmenides, The Fragments – 2003