Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. After receiving her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, she went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.
Her books of poetry include The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was long listed for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); After(HarperCollins, 2006); Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Lives of the Heart(HarperCollins, 1997); The October Palace (HarperCollins, 1994); Of Gravity & Angels(Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Alaya (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1982).
Hirshfield is also the author of Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World(Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997). She has also edited and cotranslated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Vintage Books, 1990) with Mariko Aratani; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2006) with Robert Bly; Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women(HarperCollins, 1994); and an ebook on Basho, The Heart of Haiku (2011).
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