Featuring Academy of American Poets Chancellor Jane Hirshfield and 2004-2010 Chancellor Robert Pinsky.
The Poetry Society of America's current national series, Poetry and the Natural World, will travel to five cities and focus on poems and poets from any era that are in conversation with, or are inspired by, nature. In this third installment, we'll hear from Jane Hirshfield and Robert Pinsky. A conversation moderated by Alice Quinn, PSA's Executive Director, will follow the readings.
Jane Hirshfield's most recent, eighth book of poetry is The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long-listed for the National Book Award and named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Her new book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), received the Northern California Book Award. Previous honors include the California Book Award and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A long-time resident of Mill Valley, Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere, and presents her work regularly at poetry festivals and universities both in the U.S. and world wide. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Robert Pinsky's new book of poems, At the Foundling Hospital, was published last December by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), he founded the Favorite Poem Project, featuring the videos at www.favoritepoem.org. His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and the Harold Morton Landon translation prize. His other awards include the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Korean Manhae Prize, the Italian Premio Capri and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pen American Center. He performs with pianist Laurence Hobgood on the spoken word CDs PoemJazz and House Hour, from Circumstantial Productions, and is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University.
Co-sponsored by the Mill Valley Public Library and the Poetry Society of America.
Admission is free.