Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems,
For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. His second collection,
Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent poetry collections include
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems,
Special Orders,
Lay Back the Darkness,
On Love,
Earthly Measures, and
The Night Parade.
He is also the author of the prose books The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Responsive Reading, and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, Hirsch published Poet's Choice, which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay letters from the Washington Post Book World.
Hirsch's honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he lives in New York.