"I never had the feeling that there was something I couldn't do. Now maybe that's odd. But I had a lot of women teachers, I had a lot of women role models, and I actually did not feel that if I was interested in something, I didn't have permission to pursue it."

When she was in second grade, Jane Hirshfield wrote, "I want to be a writer when I grow up" on a piece of lined paper. She found her passion at an early age, writing for school, but also creating "private poetry" and hiding it under her mattress at home.

Born in New York City in 1953, Ms. Hirshfield headed for the west coast twenty years later, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton. Hirshfield has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of San Francisco, and has been a visiting poet at many universities around the country. Her award-winning work has been called "passionate and radiant" by the New York Times Book Review. She is featured in two 1999 Bill Moyers PBS poetry specials, "Fooling With Words" and "Sounds of Poetry."

A long-term student of Zen, Ms. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and numerous other honors. Her poetry, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, and many literary periodicals, has been selected for both the Best American Poems and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She has authored four books of poems, most recently The Lives of the Heart (1997). Other titles include Alaya (1982), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), and The October Palace (1994). She recently published a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997), and edited and co-translated two collections of poetry by women writers of the past, Women in Praise of the Sacred (1994) and The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Komachi and Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court (1990).

For poems, interviews, readings and more biographical information, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/
antholog/hirshfld/poet.htm