Jane Hirshfield – Poetry Reading

Please join us for this special live, online poetry reading! Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet who explores the political, ecological, and scientific as well as the metaphysical, personal, and passionate. 

Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry including The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Her most recent collection is Ledger (2020). She has also published two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and edited and co-translated four volumes of world poetry. 

Hirshfield has been honored with numerous fellowships and awards including from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work has appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Hirshfield received the Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and in 2012, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Though not a full-time academic, Hirshfield has taught widely including at the University of California, Stanford, The Bennington Writing Seminars, and writers conferences at Bread Loaf and Napa Valley.

Currently based in California, Hirshfield was born in New York City and received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. She received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center.

“Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world…I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body.” Jane Hirshfield quoted in Contemporary Authors

“Astonishing strophes of being, Jane Hirshfield stands with the finest contemporary American poets. The Beauty reveals a poetics of being that inhabits mysteries, essences, and beautiful lyrics. In her books of prizewinning poetry, translations, and essays, one realizes her works are apertures into wisdom.” – Robert Bonazzi in World Literature Today

Free and open to all! This event will be held online via Zoom Webinar, registration required.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO REGISTER.

Please email programs@normanwilliams.org for more information.