Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield, a Zen practitioner for 35 years, is the author of six award-winning collections of poetry, including After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as a now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40^th  Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams.

Hirshfield's work has been featured in five editions of The Best American Poetry and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Her poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writer's Almanac as well as on two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. She served as one of the main voices in 2010's PBS two-hour documentary, “The Buddha.” She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the United States, and in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K. and Ireland.  Her next poetry book, Come, Thief, will appear in August 2011 from Knopf. Hirshfield received lay ordination in Soto Zen in 1979.