Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere, the values of interconnection, and the alliance of poetry and the sciences. A practitioner of Soto Zen for fifty years, she received lay-ordination in 1979 in the San Francisco Zen Center lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, following three years of monastic practice. Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University's Translation Center Award; books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, and England's T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry. Author of the newly published The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, U.S.; Bloodaxe U.K.), nine previous poetry collections, and two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows (Knopf, 2015), she has also edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield's work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. She has presented her poems at festivals and universities worldwide, and been a visiting poetry professor at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University, and Queen's University, Belfast. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
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