American Poet
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet, and peerless advocate for poetry. A retired professor who grew up in Chicago, 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 and five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.