Jennifer Michael Hecht. Courtesy Poets Online.
Jennifer Michael Hecht (born November 23, 1965) is a poet, historian, philosopher, and author.
Life[]
Hecht was born in Glen Cove on Long Island, New York. She attended Adelphi University. She earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from Columbia University in 1995, and for a time studied at the Université de Caen and the Université d’Angers.
Hecht's scholarly articles have been published in many journals and magazines, and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry magazine, among others. She has also written book reviews for the New York Times, Washington Post, American Scholar, and other publications. She has written several columns for The New York Times online "Times Select."
Her poetry has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2005, as well as in Good Poems (edited by Garrison Keillor).[1]
Hecht is a weekly guest blogger for The Best American Poetry series web site and maintains a personal blog on poetry and philosophy entitled "Dear Fonzie". She currently teaches at The New School in New York City, and resides in Brooklyn, New York.
She currently teaches poetry and philosophy in the Graduate Writing Program of The New School, teaches poetry in the Graduate Writing Program of Columbia University, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Hecht is an honorary board member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation where she told the FFRF 2009 convention audience: “If there is no god — and there isn't — then we [humans] made up morality. And I'm very impressed.”
Writing[]
In 2003 Hecht published two books of history and philosophy with two different publishers. The first, Doubt: A history: The great doubters and their legacy of innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, is an epic, worldwide study of religious doubt throughout history. The other, The End of the Soul, is a profile of an unusual group of 19th-century French anthropologists who formed the Society of Mutual Autopsy to discover links between personality, ability and brain morphology.
In 2007 Hecht published The Happiness Myth: Why what we think is right is wrong in which she attempts to examine happiness through historical perspective. Hecht maintains that our current perception of happiness is affected by culture, and that future generations may well mock our view of happiness as we make fun of earlier generations.
Recognition[]
In 2002 her debut poetry collection The Next Ancient World received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as ForeWord Magazine's award for Poetry Book of the Year. Her second collection, Funny, won the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press.
Her prose work The End of the Soul received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for 2004 from the Phi Beta Kappa Society as a book that "is an important contribution to knowledge, serious scholarship with a broad pertinence to the human condition."
Publications[]
Poetry[]
- The Next Ancient World. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9710310-0-2
- Funny. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. ISBN 0-299-21400-1
- Who Said. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2013.
Non-fiction[]
- The End of the Soul: Scientific modernity, anthropology, and atheism in France, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-231-12846-0
- Doubt: A history: The great doubters and their legacy of innovation, from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. San Francisco: Harper, 2003. ISBN 0-06-009795-7
- The Happiness Myth: Why what we think is right is wrong: A history of what really makes us happy. San Francisco: Harper, 2007. ISBN 0-06-081397-0
- also published as The Happiness Myth: The historical antidote to what isn't working today. New York: Harper, 2008.
- Stay: A history of suicide and the philosophies against it. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
No Hemlock Rock (don't kill yourself)
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[2]
See also[]
References[]
Notes[]
- ↑ C.V., Jennifer Michael Hecht, Fall 2006, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Web, Oct. 1, 2012.
- ↑ Search results = au:Jennifer Michael Hecht, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 4, 2015.
External links[]
- Poems
- Audio / video
- Books
- Jennifer Michael Hecht at Amazon.com
- About
- Jennifer Michael Hecht Official website.
- An interview with Jennifer Michael Hecht by Alison Hawthorne Deming, University of Arizona Poetry Center*Interview with Jennifer Michael Hecht (May 2007) on Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
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