Horácio Costa holds degrees from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), New York University, and Yale, and taught Brazilian and Portuguese literatures at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1987 to 2001. Since then he has taught Portuguese literature at the School of Philosophy and Letters at USP.
He has published ten books in Portuguese, many of which have been translated into Spanish. His most recent is Ciclópico Olho [Cyclopean Eye, 2011]. His Bernini: poemas 2008–2010 will be published in 2013. His work was collected in the anthology Fracta and published in Portuguese in 2005 and Spanish in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. Horácio Costa's poetry has been translated into over ten languages. He has translated into Portuguese poets such as Octavio Paz and Elizabeth Bishop. A militant gay, his most recent critical work is Retratos do Brasil Homossexual (São Paulo, 2010), a book which gathers essays from the IV conference of the Brazilian Association of Homocultural Studies, of which he was president from 2006 to 2008. He and his husband divide their time between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
