Guest Poets At The White House. No. 3 Jane Hirshfield

Many national and international poets have called into the White House when in Limerick. Pictured above, in The White House, is Jane Hirshfield during her recent visit to Limerick as a guest of Cuisle - Limerick City international Poetry Festival.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After (forthcoming from HarperCollins in early 2006), Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; 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 of California’s Poetry Medal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, four of the past six volumes of The Best American Poetry, and many other publications, and has been featured numerous times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac program, as well as in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield 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.