Living by Poems

Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield has become one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere and interconnection. Her ten poetry books include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), holding fifty years of poems, and she is the author also of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s infrastructure and craft and four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the California Book Award. An interactive traveling installation she founded in 2017, Poets For Science, has appeared across the country at universities, museums, research centers, conferences, and the National Academy of Sciences. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Michael is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).