‘Poet’s Poet’ Edward Hirsch to Visit JSC

March 5, 2015

Edward Hirsch, a lifelong, award-winning poet and author of the best-selling How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, will read from his critically acclaimed work at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the Stearns Cinema Room at Johnson State College.

Described by Peter Stitt in Poetry as “a poet of genuine talent and feeling,” Hirsch has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008) and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010).

He is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014) and Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).

Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and 17 years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

The event is free and open to the public.

For information, contact Sandra Noyes, Writing & Literature, Sandra.Noyes@jsc.edu or 802-635-1340.