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Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Her books of poetry include Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hirshfield is also the author of Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World(Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), and an an ebook on Basho, The Heart of Haiku (2011). She has also edited and cotranslated books with Mariko Aratani and Robert Bly. 

Her honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Literature, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, Columbia University's Translation Center Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her work has been selected for seven editions of Best American Poetry and, in 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the seventieth Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In addition to her work as a freelance writer, editor, and translator, Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, in the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, and at the University of San Francisco. She has been a visiting Poet-in-Residence at Duke University, the University of Alaska, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere, and has been the Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017 and is the guest editor for Poem-a-Day in April 2021 (National Poetry Month). Hirshfield lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

From https://poets.org/poet/jane-hirshfield. 

For more information about Jane Hirshfield:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Sunita Puri about Hirshfield, at 23:00: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-108-sunita-puri

“Jane Hirshfield”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jane-hirshfield

Ledger by Jane Hirschfield: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612680/ledger-by-jane-hirshfield/

“Jane Hirshfield: The Fullness of Things”: https://onbeing.org/programs/jane-hirshfield-the-fullness-of-things/