Jane Hirshfield (born February 24, 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.

Life, education, and work

Jane Hirshfield was born on East 20th Street in New York City. She received her bachelor's degree in 1973 from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

, in the school's first graduating class to include women as freshmen, and received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979. Hirshfield's nine books of poetry have received numerous awards, including the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry Her fifth book, ''Given Sugar, Given Salt'', was a finalist for the

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".T.S. Eliot Prize The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Priz ...

" (UK) and named a 'best book of 2006' by ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'', the ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The ...

'', and the ''

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Ni ...

''. Her eighth collection, ''The Beauty,'' was long-listed for the

National Book Award The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

and named a 'best book of 2015' by ''The San Francisco Chronicle''. She has written two books of essays, ''Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry'' and ''Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World''. ''The Ink Dark Moon'', her co-translation of the work of the two foremost women poets of classical-era Japan, was instrumental in bringing

tanka is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Etymology Originally, in the time of the '' Man'yōshū'' (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term ''tanka'' was used to distinguish "short p ...

(a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form) to the attention of American poets. She has edited four books collecting the work of poets from the past and is noted as being "part of a wave of important scholarship then seeking to recover the forgotten history of women writers." She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, the Academy of American Poets' 2004 Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2005. Though never a full-time academic, Hirshfield has taught at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

University of San Francisco The University of San Francisco (USF) is a private Jesuit university in San Francisco, California. The university's main campus is located on a setting between the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park. The main campus is nicknamed "The Hil ...

, The Bennington Writing Seminars, and as the Elliston Visiting Poet at the

University of Cincinnati The University of Cincinnati (UC or Cincinnati) is a public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1819 as Cincinnati College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in Cincinnati and has an annual enrollment of over 44,0 ...

. She was the Hellman Visiting Artist in 2013 in the Neuroscience Department at

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

, and Stanford University's 2016 Mohr Visiting Professor in Poetry. In 2022, she was the third Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen's University Belfast. She has also taught at many writers conferences, including Bread Loaf and the Napa Valley Writers Conference and has served as both core and associate faculty in the Bennington Master of Fine Arts Writing Seminars.Jane Hirshfield profile
Academy of American Poets, accessed January 15, 2007 Hirshfield appears frequently in literary festivals both in America and abroad, including the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the

National Book Festival The National Book Festival is a literary festival in the United States organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, founded by Laura Bush and James H. Billington in 2001. Background In 1995 the First Lady of Texas Laura Bush (a former ...

, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Poetry International (London, UK), the China Poetry Festival (Xi'an, China), and the Second International Gathering of the Poets raków, Poland She has received numerous residency fellowships, including from

Yaddo Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March ...

The MacDowell Colony MacDowell is an artist's residency program in Peterborough, New Hampshire, United States, founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, pianist and philanthropist Marian MacDowell. Prior to July 2020, it was known as the MacDowell ...

, The Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Civitella Ranieri, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She is also a contributing editor at ''

The Alaska Quarterly Review ''The Alaska Quarterly Review'' is a biannual literary journal founded in 1980 by Ronald Spatz and James Liszka at the University of Alaska Anchorage and continued unaffiliated in 2020.July 1, 2020 University of Alaska Anchorage ended its financi ...

'' and ''

Ploughshares ''Ploughshares'' is an American literary journal established in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, ''Ploughshares'' has been based at Emerson College in Bos ...

'', a former guest editor of ''

The Pushcart Prize The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are ...

Anthology'' and an advisory editor at '' Orion'' and ''

Tricycle A tricycle, sometimes abbreviated to trike, is a human-powered (or gasoline or electric motor powered or assisted, or gravity powered) three-wheeled vehicle. Some tricycles, such as cycle rickshaws (for passenger transport) and freight trikes ...

''. Hirshfield served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012–2017). In 2019, Hirshfield was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Poetry

David Baker described Hirshfield as "one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets" and U.S. Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan Kay Ryan (born September 21, 1945) is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named ...

called Hirshfield "a true person of letters". Hirshfield's poetry has often been described as sensuous, insightful, and clear. In the award citation for Hirshfield's 2004 Academy of American Poets' Fellowship, Rosanna Warren noted

Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind. Her poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature. Clause by clause, image by image, in language at once mysterious and commonplace, Hirshfield's poems clear a space for reflection and change. They invite ethical awareness, and establish a delicate balance.

The comment is echoed by the Polish Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote, "A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings... It is precisely this I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. The subject of her poetry is our ordinary life among other people and our continuing encounter with everything Earth brings us: trees, flowers, animals, and birds…In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness." Hirshfield's poetry reflects her immersion in a wide range of poetic traditions, both Asian and Western, interests found also in the essays of Nine Gates and Ten Windows. Polish, Scandinavian, and Eastern European poets have been particularly important to her, along with the poetry of Japan and China. Zbigniew Herbert's poem, "Pebble" stands as a model behind the small studies Hirshfield has labelled "pebbles", included in ''After'' and ''Come, Thief''. Hirshfield's work consistently explores themes of social justice and environmental awareness, specifically the belief that natural world and human world are inextricably linked. Mark A. Eaton noted in ''The Dictionary of Literary Biography'' that "Hirshfield's work recognizes the full breadth and responsibilities of humans' transactions with the earth, not just the intimacies." Donna Seaman, reviewing Hirshfield's ninth collection, ''Ledger'', described Hirshfield's "carefully weighted tone as she reckons with our constant subtraction of Earth's life forces and incessant addition of carbon to our atmosphere, acid to our seas." Hirshfield has become an increasingly visible spokesperson for peace, justice, and environmental issues. In a review of her seventh collection,''Come, Thief'', Afaa M. Weaver wrote that her poems "find a middle ground between the larger landscape of political conflict and the personal landscape of our need to connect with one another." Hirshfield's voice as a spokesperson for peace, justice, and environmental issues has become increasing visible, with her work concluding the Library of America's "War No More: Three Hundred Years of American Antiwar and Peace Writing" and appearing in many other collections of poems of social awareness.{{cite news, url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/books/review/american-poets-refusing-to-go-gentle-rage-against-the-right.html, title=American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right, first=Alexandra, last=Alter, date=April 21, 2017, access-date=January 29, 2018, newspaper=The New York Times An article in ''Critical Survey of Poetry'' (2002) summarized the effect of Zen on Hirshfield's work:

Little of her poetry is political in the usual sense of direct comment on specific issues, but all her work is political in the sense of integrating the stirrings of the heart, with the political realities that surround all people. Undoubtedly, the source for these characteristics of her poetry, and for her very concept of what poetry is, "the magnification of being," derives from her strong Zen Buddhist training. Her emphasis on compassion, on the preexistent unity of subject and object, on nature, on the self-sufficient suchness of being, and on the daunting challenge of accepting transitoriness, as Peter Harris notes, are central themes in her poetry derived from Buddhism. Hirshfield does not, however, burden her poetry with heavy, overt Zen attitudes. Only occasionally is there any direct reference.

While many reviewers mention, even make central, Hirshfield's Buddhism as the prevailing filter of her work, Hirshfield has expressed frustration in multiple interviews with being so labeled. "I always feel a slight dismay if I'm called a "Zen" poet. I am not. I am a human poet, that's all." Lisa Russ Spaar has called Hirshfield "a visionary", continuing: "It is arguable that the riddle, the existential joke of being, of meaning, of Dickinson's "prank of the Heart at play on the Heart," is as powerful a source as song for the lyric poem. Central to Hirshfield's vision is a kind of holy delight that is at the heart of riddles and koans". Other reviewers note the investigative nature of Hirshfield's poems, in which life is approached as a puzzle which is not quite solvable. In a review of ''Come, Thief'' in ''

The Georgia Review ''The Georgia Review'' is a literary journal based in Athens, Georgia. Founded at University of Georgia in 1947, the journal features poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and visual art. The journal has won National Magazine Awards for Fiction ...

'', Judith Kitchen wrote "Jane Hirshfield's felt longing elevates description to insight: not self-knowledge, less fleeting than that... something more encompassing, more akin to the indefinable suddenly given expression." For all her focus on insight and the unknowable, as early as 1995, Stephen Yenser noted in ''The Yale Review'' Hirshfield's interest in the empirical. "The probably unspeakeable plenitude of the empirical world: Jane Hirshfield's poems recognize it at every point." In a ''

Booklist ''Booklist'' is a publication of the American Library Association that provides critical reviews of books and audiovisual materials for all ages. ''Booklist''s primary audience consists of libraries, educators, and booksellers. The magazine is av ...

'' starred review, Donna Seaman has more recently noted Hirshfield's "meticulous reasoning, including a striking meditation on the paradoxical richness of spareness that can serve as her ars poetica." Hirshfield's poems and life increasingly reflect her long-standing interest in biology, as well as physics and other fields of science. She was the 2013 Hellman Visiting Artist in the Neuroscience department at The

, a program "created to foster dialogue between scientists, caregivers, patients, clinicians and the public regarding creativity and the brain." In 2010, she was the Blue River Fellow in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest's Long Term Ecological Reflection project, whose goal is to track scientific research and artistic responses to the same sites for 200 years. In 2017, Hirshfield organized a Poets For Science component for the main D.C. March for Science held on Earth Day, April 22, on the Washington Mall. As a main rally speaker, she read "On the Fifth Day", a poem protesting the January 24, 2017, removal of scientific information from federal agency websites. The poem appeared on the front page of the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

's'' Opinion Section a week before the March. Working with the Wick Poetry Center based at

Kent State University Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio. The university also includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio and additional facilities in the region and internationally. Regional campuses are located in ...

in Ohio, Hirshfield arranged also for a Poets For Science tent to be part of the teach-in preceding the March, in which scientists and their supporters were invited both to read and to write their own scientifically-grounded poems. Poets For Science activities from the March and into the future are hosted on the Wick Poetry Center's website. Video of Hirshfield's reading at the March for Science. While her work looks deeply at the inner world of the self and emotions, Hirshfield has kept most of the details of her private life out of both her poems and her public life as a poet, preferring that her work stand on its own. Hirshfield's work has been published in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'', '' Atlantic Monthly'', ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...

'', the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

'', the ''

Times Literary Supplement ''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp. History The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to '' The Times'' but became a separate publication ...

'', the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', many literary journals, and multiple volumes of The ''

Best American Poetry ''The Best American Poetry'' series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems. Background The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, has a different guest editor every year. Lehman, still the general ...

'' and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her poems have frequently been read on various National Public Radio programs, and she was featured in two

Bill Moyers Bill Moyers (born Billy Don Moyers, June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Counci ...

PBS television specials, ''The Sounds of Poetry'' and ''Fooling With Words''. An interview with Hirshfield on the occasion of the publication of "The Beauty" and "Ten Windows" in March 2015 was published in

SF Gate The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The pap ...

. Extended conversations with fellow poets Ilya Kaminsky (

The Paris Review ''The Paris Review'' is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, ''The Paris Review'' published works by Jack Kerouac, Phil ...

), Kaveh Akbar (

The American Poetry Review ''The American Poetry Review'' (''APR'') is an American poetry magazine printed every other month on tabloid-sized newsprint. It was founded in 1972 by Stephen Berg and Stephen Parker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The magazine's editor is Elizabet ...

), and Mark Doty (

Guernica Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the mu ...

) appeared in conjunction with the publication of ''Ledger'' in 2020.

Bibliography

{{Expand list, date=March 2015{{bots, deny=Citation bot

Poetry

;Collections * {{cite book , author=Hirshfield, Jane , title=Alaya , publisher=Quarterly Review of Literature , year=1982 * {{cite book , author=Hirshfield, Jane , author-mask=1 , title=Of gravity & angels , publisher=Wesleyan University Press , year=1988Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry. * ''The October Palace'' (HarperCollins, 1994), winner of the Poetry Center Book Award * ''The Lives of the Heart'' (HarperCollins,1997), winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award * ''Given Sugar, Given Salt'' (HarperCollins, 2001), finalist for the

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".Ploughshares ''Ploughshares'' is an American literary journal established in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, ''Ploughshares'' has been based at Emerson College in Bos ...

, volume=37 , issue=2&3 , {{cite book , author=Hirshfield, Jane , editor=Henderson, Bill , title=The Pushcart Prize XXXVII : best of the small presses 2013 , publisher=Pushcart Press , date=2013 , pages=295 , chapter=In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed , - , Husband , 2015 , {{cite journal , author=Hirshfield, Jane , date=April 13, 2015 , title=Husband , journal=The New Yorker , volume=91 , issue=8 , pages=48 , url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/husband-poem-jane-hirshfield , access-date=June 21, 2015 , , - , Engraving: World-Tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch , 2016 , {{cite journal , author=Hirshfield, Jane , date=June 12, 2016 , title=Engraving: World tree with an empty beehive on one branch , journal=The New York Times T Magazine , url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/t-magazine/georg-baselitz-and-jane-hirshfield-art-poem.html?_r=0 , access-date=June 18, 2016 , - , Tin , 2021 , {{cite journal , author=Hirshfield, Jane , date=September 13, 2021 , title=Tin , journal=The New Yorker , volume=97 , issue=28 , pages=65 , url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/tin ,

Non-fiction

*{{cite book , last1=Komachi , first1=Ono no , author-link1=Ono no Komachi , last2=Shikibu , first2=Izumi , author-link2=Izumi Shikibu , editor1-last=Hirshfield , editor1-first=Jane , editor2-last=Aratani , editor2-first=Mariko , title=The ink dark moon : love poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, women of the ancient Court of Japan , publisher=Vintage Classics , date=1990 *{{cite book , editor-last=Hirshfield , editor-first=Jane , title=Women in praise of the sacred : forty-three centuries of spiritual poetry by women , publisher=Vintage Classics , date=1994 *{{cite book, author=Jane Hirshfield, title=Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry , url=https://archive.org/details/ninegatesenterin00hirs_0, url-access=registration, date=August 26, 1998, publisher=HarperCollins, isbn=978-0-06-092948-0 *{{cite book, editor1=Robert Bly, editor2=Jane Hirshfield, title=Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, url=https://archive.org/details/mirabai00robe, url-access=registration, year=2004, publisher=Beacon Press, isbn=978-0-8070-6386-6 * ''The Heart of Haiku'' (Kindle Single, 2011) {{cite web, url=https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Haiku-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B0057IYMF4, title=Amazon.com: The Heart of Haiku (Kindle Single) eBook: Jane Hirshfield: Kindle Store, website=Amazon.com, access-date=January 29, 2018 * {{cite book, title=Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=t7GFBAAAQBAJ, date=March 17, 2015, publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, isbn=978-0-385-35106-5{{cite news, url=https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/25/caution-world-changing-poetry-at-work, title=Caution: World-Changing Poetry at Work, first=Joseph, last=Peschel, date=May 25, 2015, access-date=January 29, 2018, via=TheDailyBeast.com, newspaper=The Daily Beast ——————— ;Notes {{reflist, 30em, group=lower-alpha

Honors and awards

* The Poetry Center Book Award * The California Book Award * Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation * Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, * Fellowship, Academy of American Poets * Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts * Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry * Columbia University's Translation Center Award * Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal * Bay Area Book Reviewers Award * Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement from The Academy of American Poets (2004) * Finalist, T. S. Eliot Prize * Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award * Long-list National Book Award * Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012–2017){{cite web, url=https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jane-hirshfield , title=Jane Hirshfield , website=poets.org , access-date=May 8, 2019 * elected, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2019){{cite web, url=https://www.amacad.org/newly-elected-members , title=Newly Elected Members , website=amacad.org , access-date=May 8, 2019

References

{{reflist

External links

{{External links, date=January 2018
Profile at Poetry Archive

Profile at Poetry Foundation

Hirshfield on Poetry Everywhere, reading ''For What Binds Us'' at the Geraldine R. Dodge festival (video; 2:17)

Jane Hirshfield reading from new work at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar (audio; 16:09)

* ttp://www.slate.com/authors.jane_hirshfield.html/ Jane Hirshfield's poems at ''Slate''
Jane Hirshfield's poems in ''The New Yorker''Jane Hirshfield's poems in ''The Atlantic''Jane Hirshfield's essay, "Justice: Four Windows" in the ''Virginia Quarterly Review''

ttp://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/09/bouldrey-jane-hirshfield-pt-2.html part 2br>part 3

Hirshfield's interview and reading at the Scottish Poetry Library,spring, 2012

"Why Write Poetry?"
(with Jane Haupt) in ''Psychology Today'', January 2014
Hirshfield's interview with Kaveh Akbar in "Divedapper", March 21, 2016
{{Authority control {{DEFAULTSORT:Hirshfield, Jane Living people 1953 births Princeton University alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty University of San Francisco faculty University of Cincinnati faculty MacDowell Colony fellows National Endowment for the Arts Fellows Poets from California 20th-century American essayists American women essayists American women poets American literary editors The New Yorker people 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American translators 21st-century American essayists 21st-century American poets 21st-century American women writers 21st-century American translators Poets from New York (state) Writers from New York City American Buddhists American women academics