Sacramento Poetry Center

An Evening with Jane Hirshfield

Thursday, May 4, 2006
7:00-8:30 PM

Sutter Cancer Center-Buhler Building
2800 L Street, First Floor


Prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist Jane Hirshfield will appear at the Sutter Cancer Center, 2800 L St., Sacramento, as part of Sutter's Literature, Art, and Medicine Program (LAMP) author series Thursday, May 4, 2006, from 7-8:30 p.m. Hirshfield will read, answer questions and sign books on the first floor of the Cancer Center. The program is free and open to all.

Hirshfield's poetry speaks to the central issues of human existence-desire and loss and impermanence and beauty. Described by reviewers as "radiant and passionate," "ethically aware," "insightful and eloquent," and as conveying "a succinct wisdom," her work ranges from the metaphysical and passionate to the political and scientific to the subtle unfolding of daily life. An generous master of her art, Hirshfield has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, a member of the Bennington College MFA faculty, and has been received with wide acclaim in her many appearances at writers conferences, literary centers, and festivals both in this country and abroad.

Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After (HarperCollins, 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.