Join us for a reading and Q&A with award-winning poets Edward Hirsch (Stranger by Night, Penguin, 2020) and Jeffrey Harrison (Between Lakes, Four Way Books, 2020) as they read from their latest collections and discuss the craft of poetry. This reading is free and open to the public, though we would be most grateful for a donation.
Please support our friends at the family-owned local Village Bookstore in Pleasantville, NY where you order the readers’ books here.
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. He 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.
Edward 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), which brings together thirty-five years of poems. Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study,Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. 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 seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of Between Lakes (Four Way Books, 2020), Into Daylight (Tupelo Press, 2015) Incomplete Knowledge (2006), The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), and Feeding the Fire (2001), as well as the chapbook An Undertaking (2005). In spring 2006, the Waywiser Press published The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems in the United Kingdom. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He has taught at several universities and schools, including George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, College of the Holy Cross, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.