Born in New York City in 1953, Jane Hirshfield has established herself as a poet, freelance writer, translator and teacher. In receiving her B.A. from Princeton University, Hirshfield was a member of the first graduating class to ever include women at the elite university, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

From Princeton, she went on to study at the Zen Center in San Francisco. She soon taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of San Francisco before moving on to numerous visiting poet opportunities at other universities across the country.

She was just in second grade when she first articulated she wanted to be a writer. Her passion for writing showed up in her schooling though Hirshfield acknowledges that her early poetry was private, hidden under her mattress at home.

Hirshfield is one of today's most recognized poets, having won numerous awards. She earned fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and has won the Poetry Center Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Columbia University's Translation Center Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal.

Then, in the fall 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship, an award for "distinguished poetic achievement." That prestigious honor has previously gone to the likes of Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop in prior years.

Her poetry has been called "passionate and radiant" by the New York Times Book Review and she was featured in two separate Bill Moyers PBS poetry specials, "Fooling With Words" and "Sounds of Poetry ." She has authored several books of poetry including "After," "Given Sugar, Given Salt,""The Lives of the Heart," "Alaya," "Of Gravity & Angels," and "The October Palace."

Hirshfield has also published a book of essays, "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry " and edited and co-translated other collections of poetry. In recent yers she has served as a member of the faculty at the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, at Bennington College in Vermont.

Poem With Two Endings

Say "death" and the whole room freezes--
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)