Jane Hirshfield, described in The New York Times Magazine as “writing some of the most important poems in the world today,” is the author of ten much-honored books of poetry, most recently The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023); two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997)and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015); and four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past.

Among American poetry's central spokespersons for issues of the biosphere, climate, and interconnection, Jane is also a poet of interior life: finding a way to say yes to the complexity, difficulties, and losses that any life brings has been an abiding theme. Her honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. She received the 2024 Zhongkun International Poet Award, China’s foremost independently-given honor for a world poet. Her books have been finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and long-listed for the National Book Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poems.

Jane has taught at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University, Queen’s University, Belfast, the Bread Loaf and Napa Valley writers conferences, and elsewhere. She’s presented at universities and festivals worldwide and her work has been translated into eighteen languages. Her TED-ED animated lesson on metaphor has been viewed over 1.5 million times. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.