17 Facts About Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield was born on East 20th Street in New York City.

Jane Hirshfield received her bachelor's degree in 1973 from Princeton University, in the school's first graduating class to include women as freshmen, and received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979.

Jane Hirshfield has written two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

Jane Hirshfield was the Hellman Visiting Artist in 2013 in the Neuroscience Department at University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University's 2016 Mohr Visiting Professor in Poetry.

Jane Hirshfield has taught at many writers conferences, including Bread Loaf and the Napa Valley Writers Conference and has served as both core and associate faculty in the Bennington Master of Fine Arts Writing Seminars.

Jane Hirshfield has received numerous residency fellowships, including from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Civitella Ranieri, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

Jane Hirshfield is a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, a former guest editor of The Pushcart Prize Anthology and an advisory editor at Orion and Tricycle.

Jane Hirshfield served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

In 2019, Jane Hirshfield was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2024, Jane Hirshfield became the inaugural guest editor for Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.

Jane Hirshfield's poetry has often been described as sensuous, insightful, and clear.

Jane Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind.

Jane Hirshfield's poetry reflects her immersion in a wide range of poetic traditions, both Asian and Western, interests found in the essays of Nine Gates and Ten Windows.

Zbigniew Herbert's poem, "Pebble" stands as a model behind the small studies Jane Hirshfield has labelled "pebbles", included in After and Come, Thief.

In 2017, Jane Hirshfield organized a Poets For Science component for the main DC March for Science held on Earth Day, April 22, on the Washington Mall.

Jane Hirshfield's work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, many literary journals, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Jane Hirshfield's poems have frequently been read on various National Public Radio programs, and she was featured in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling With Words.