The October Palace

Jane Hirshfield (born in New York City) is a poet whose work draws on Zen Buddhism, deep ecology, and a sustained attention to the natural world to probe the nature of consciousness and existence. She graduated from Princeton University in its first coeducational class in 1973 and spent eight years in Zen Buddhist practice and study. Her collections include Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Beauty (Knopf, 2015). She was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Academy of American Poets, and the Rockefeller Foundation.