Hilbert's unpublished collection "Cathedral Building", which combines a wide variety of styles and poetic approaches, has been a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry (under the title "Removal of the Body"), the Barrow Street Press Book Contest, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. It also received an honorable mention for the Dorset Prize. Other books were finalists for the May Swenson Award, the Field Poetry Prize, the Vassar Miller Award, and the Richard Wilbur Award.