
Jane Hirshfield in 2011. Photo by Adam Phillips. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Jane Hirshfield (born February 24, 1953) is an American poet.[1]
Life[]
Youth and education[]
Hirshfield was born in New York City.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's 1st graduating class to include women. She later studied at the San Francisco Zen Center, including 3 years of monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.[2] She received lay ordination in Soto Zen in 1979.
Career[]
Hirshfield has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and translator. Her seven books of poetry have each received numerous awards. She has written a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. The Ink Dark Moon, her co-translation of the work of the two foremost women poets of classical-era Japan, was instrumental in bringing tanka (a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form predating the better known haiku) to the attention of American poets. She has three edited books collecting the work of women poets.
Never a full time academic, Hirsfield has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of San Francisco, and (as the Elliston Visiting Poet) at the University of Cincinnati. She has also taught at many writers conferences, including Bread Loaf and The Napa Valley Writers Conference and has served as both core and associate faculty in the Bennington Master of Fine Arts Writing Seminars.[2] Hirshfield appears frequently in literary festivals both in America and abroad, including the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the National Book Festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Poetry International (London, UK), the China Poetry Festival (Xi'an, China), and the Second International Gathering of the Poets [Krakow, Poland]. She is also a contributing editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, a former guest editor of The Pushcart Prize Anthology and an advisory editor at Orion and Tricycle.
Hirshfield's work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, many literary journals, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.[3] Her poems have frequently been read on various National Public Radio programs.
Recognition[]
Hershfield's 5th book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and her 6th collection, After, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (UK) and named a "best book of 2006" by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times.
She was featured in 2 Bill Moyers PBS television specials, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling With Words.
Awards[]
- The Poetry Center Book Award
- The California Book Award
- Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation
- Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation,
- Fellowship, Academy of American Poets
- Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
- Columbia University's Translation Center Award
- Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal
- Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
- Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement from The Academy of American Poets (2004)
- Finalist, T.S. Eliot Prize
- Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
- Elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, (2012)[4]
Publications[]
Poetry[]
- Alaya. Princeton, NJ: Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1982.
- Of Gravity & Angels. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.
- The October Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
- The Lives of the Heart. new York: HarperCollins, 1997.
- Given Sugar, Given Salt. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
- After. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
- Come, Thief. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Non-fiction[]
- Nine Gates: Entering the mind of poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
- Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three generative energies of poetry. Newcastle, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008.
- The Heart of Haiku. Seattle, WA: Amazon Kindle Single, 2011.
Translated[]
- The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Editor and translator, with Mariko Aratani). New York: Scribner, 1988
- expanded edition, New York: Random House, 1990.
- Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-three centuries of spiritual poetry by women (editor and translator). New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
- Mirabai: Ecstatic poems (editor and translator, with Robert Bly). Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Anthologized[]
- Best American Poetry, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012.
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.[5]
Audio / video[]
Jane Hirshfield Dear Poet 2017
- Jane Hirshfield: A reading November 29, 1995. Tucson, AZ: Tucson Poetry Center, 1995.
- Poetry and Life (CD). Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Institute, 2006.
- Jane Hirshfield: Recorded October 24, 2012, Concord, New Hampshire (CD). Andover, NH: Story Preservation Initiative, 2012.
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the WorldCat.[6]
See also[]
References[]
- ↑ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 342: Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by J. Scott Bryson, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, and Roger Thompson, Virginia Military Institute. Gale, 2008. pp. 178-184.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Jane Hirshfield, Academy of American Poets, Poets.org, Web, January 15, 2007.
- ↑ [1] Jane Hirshfield biography page at HarperCollins Web site, accessed January 15, 2006
- ↑ [2]
- ↑ Jane Hirshfield b. 1953, Poetry Foundation, Web, Oct. 6, 2012.
- ↑ Search results = au:Jane Hirshfield + audiobook, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, May 13, 2018.
External links[]
- Poems
- Jane Hirshfield b. 1953 at the Poetry Foundation
- Four poems by Jane Hirshfield at World Literature Today
- Jane Hirshfield profile & 10 poems at the Academy of American Poets
- Jane Hirshfield's poems in The Atlantic
- Jane Hirshfield at PoemHunter (9 poems)
- Prose
- Audio / video
- Jane Hirshfield (1953- ) at The Poetry Archive.
- Jane Hirshfield at YouTube
- Jane Hirshfield reading from new work at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar (audio; 16:09)
- Books
- Jane Hirshfield at Amazon.com
- About
- Jane Hirshfield's Web pages at the Steven Barclay Agency Web site
- Best American Poetry interview on the publication of Come Thief, "A Conversation with Brian Bouldrey" Part 1] part 2 part 3
- "Letting What Enters Enter" at Salon magazine
- "Human Lives: A conversation between Jane Hirshfield and Leslie McGrath, for VIDA
- Hirshfield interview on Voice of America, October, 2011
- Some Place Not Yet Known: An interview with Jane Hirshfield at The Atlantic
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