Edward Hirsch (born January 20, 1950) is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City (not to be mistaken with E. D. Hirsch, Jr.).Hirsch was born in Chicago. He had a childhood involvement with poetry, which he later explored at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.
Hirsch was a professor of English at Wayne State University. In 1985, he joined the faculty at the University of Houston, where he spent 17 years as a professor in the Creative Writing Program and Department of English. He was appointed the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation on September 3, 2002. He holds seven honorary degrees.
Hirsch is a well-known advocate for poetry whose essays have been published in the American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He wrote a weekly column on poetry for The Washington Post Book World from 2002-2005, which resulted in his book Poet’s Choice (2006). His other prose books include Responsive Reading (1999) and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). He is the editor of Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994), Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and To a Nightingale (2007). He is the co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations and The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).
Hirsch's first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second book, Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a five-year MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. He received the William Park Riley Prize from the Modern Language Association for the best scholarly essay in PMLA for the year 1991. He has also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hirsch’s book, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), was a surprise bestseller and remains in print through multiple printings.
Works
Poetry collections
- For the Sleepwalkers, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981)
- Wild Gratitude, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)
- The Night Parade, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)
- Earthly Measures, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
- On Love, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
- Lay Back the Darkness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)
- Special Orders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
Non-fiction books
- Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, Selected and Introduced by Edward Hirsch, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994)
- How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999)
- Responsive Reading, (1999)
- 'Introduction' in John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, (New York: Modern Library, 2001)
- The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Expression, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2002)
- Poet's Choice, (New York: Harcourt, 2006)
