Jane Hirshfield, born in New York City and a longtime resident of northern California, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Asking: New & Selected Poems (US, Knopf, 2023; UK, Bloodaxe Books, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This draws upon books including her earlier UK retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), and four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). After was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Called 'one of the most important writers in the world today' (The New York Times Magazine) and one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere, she is the founder of an online and travelling interactive exhibit exploring the alliance of poetry and science. Also the author of Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, 2008) and two now-classic US collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), she has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past: the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (US, 1988; UK 2023) and The Heart of Haiku (2011), both with Mariko Aratani; and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004), with Robert Bly. Her own poetry has been translated into seventeen languages, including by Czesław Miłosz, who wrote the introduction to her 2002 Polish Selected Poems. Recipient of numerous literary awards, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she has taught at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere, and was the 2022 Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast. In July 2024 Jane Hirshfield became the first American and the first woman to receive the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize at a ceremony held at the 2024 Sino-American Poetry Festival at Peking University in China. The International Poetry Prize is given to poets whose work is deemed to have profound connotations and humanistic values, and whose Chinese translation has had a significant impact on contemporary Chinese poetry.
Author photo: Curt Richter
Three Generative Energies of Poetry: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures
Publication Date : 27 Mar 2008
