Episode 34: Jane Hirshfield

Melissa Studdard has an insightful conversation with prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist, Jane Hirshfield. We focus on Hirshfield’s most recent collection, Come, Thief: Poems and discuss her other works as well.

Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry and a book of essays, and co-editor and co-translator of four books. Her work, which is frequently anthologized in places such as The Best Spiritual Writing, The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, deals with subjects that range “from the metaphysical and passionate to the political, ecological, and scientific to subtle unfoldings of daily life and experience.”

Hirshfield’s honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Award and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award. In fall 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy.

The Christian Science Monitor calls Hirshfield’s poems, “An evocative mix of control and wildness, stunning beauty and unseen forces.” The Washington Post says they are, “Poems that brilliantly portray even mundane experiences as if they were nothing short of revelation.”

For more information on our guest please visit: http://barclayagency.com/hirshfield.html

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