Jane Hirshfield's Biography

Jane Hirshfield, whose work has been called “passionate and radiant” by the New York Times Book Review, is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011) and After (HarperCollins, 2006; Bloodaxe Books (UK), 2006), which was named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post,The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times; After was also a Poetry Book Society Choice and T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist finalist in its UK edition. Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001) was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Other poetry collections include Alaya (Quarterly Review of Literature Series, 1982), Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), The October Palace (HarperCollins, 1994), and The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997). Hirshfield is also the author of a now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), and editor and co-translator of three collections of poetry by women writers of the past, Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (HarperCollins, 1994), The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Komachi and Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court (Vintage Classics, 1990), and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004, with Robert Bly).  A new poetry collection, Come, Thief, will appear from Knopf in August 2011.

Born in New York City in 1953 and educated at Princeton University, where she graduated with the first class of women, Hirshfield has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and, in 2004, the 70th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously held by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and numerous other honors. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and many literary periodicals, and has been selected multiple times for both the Best American Poems and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists in San Francisco, Detroit, Canberra, and Krakow, and her poems have appeared in placards on the public transit systems of New York, Los Angeles, and Portland. Featured in two Bill Moyers PBS poetry specials, Fooling with Words and The Sound of Poetry , Hirshfield has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, Bennington College’s MFA Writing Seminars, and has been a visiting poet at many universities in the U.S. and abroad.