Feb
17
12:00am
Alaska Quarterly Review Presents: FACTS INTO POEMS - A Craft Conversation between Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux
By Anchorage Museum
Two of America’s most esteemed poets, Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux, discuss two of their poems that emerged from the same factual source and their craft approach to writing those poems. Then the conversation moves into to larger craft conversation about writing from newspapers and other facts. One of Dorianne’s books is Facts About the Moon, and Jane has other poems that have emerged from The New York Times science or news articles.
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor. Her poetry collections include Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also edited and co-translated books with Mariko Aratani and Robert Bly. Hirshfield has written two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and TenWindows: How Great Poems Transform the World. The Ink Dark Moon, her co-translation of the work of the two foremost women poets of classical-era Japan, was instrumental in bringing tanka (a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form) to the attention of American poets. She has edited four books collecting the work of poets from the past and is noted as being "part of a wave of important scholarship then seeking to recover the forgotten history of women writers." She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, the Academy of American Poets' 2004 Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2005, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry in 2012.
Hirshfield is a contributing editor for The Alaska Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, a former guest editor of The Pushcart Prize Anthology and an advisory editor at Orion and Tricycle. She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012-2017) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux is the author of several collections of poetry, including What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoke; Facts about the Moon, chosen by the poet Ai as winner of the Oregon Book Award and also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Book of Men, which was awarded the Paterson Prize; and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected.
Laux has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a Pushcart Prize winner. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
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Anchorage Museum
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