Hu is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, which grew out of his graduate studies in film, as well as two studies of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud and Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass.

A former network engineer, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is at work on two new projects: a book of poems on the idea of punishment, and a book on digital infrastructure in the global South.

He has received the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his poetry, and an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. His poems have been published in places such as Boston Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, the Academy of American Poets's Poem-a-Day, and the anthology Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Hybrid Literary Genres.