Poetry, at its best, takes us beyond our analytical minds and lands us in an embodied experience. It helps us meet the despair which inevitably rises up in the darkest moments. Poetry can cut windows and doors in your despair and give you a way to walk back into the world with others. 

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist and translator. She's the author of ten books of poetry and two collections of essays. She has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her poems appear in a wide range of prestigious outlets. A resident of Northern California, she is a chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets. She presents her work at literary and interdisciplinary events worldwide. In 2017, in conjunction with the March for Science in Washington DC, she founded Poets for Science, an interactive exhibit of science poems and writing invitation housed at Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center, which has traveled to venues across the country.

Jane Hirshfield has authored many books including The October Palace (HarperCollins 1994), The Lives of the Heart (Harper Collins 1997), Women in Praise of the Sacred (HarperCollins 1994), Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Perennial 1998), After (Harper Collins 2006), Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins 2001), Come, Thief (Knopf 2011), Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf 2015), The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2015), Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf 2020) and The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2023)

Interview Date: 9/1/2023   Tags: Jane Hirshfield, Poetry, Hersch Wilson, bryophyta, mosses, kinship of all life, despair, March for Science, beauty, Poetry, Art & Creativity, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Philosophy