¿Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York City and received her A.B. from Princeton University in 1973. She has lived in northern California since 1974. In 2005 Bloodaxe Books published Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems, her first British publication, drawing on ¿ve award-winning American collections: Alaya (1982), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), The October Palace (1994), The Lives of the Heart (1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001). This was followed by three later collections from Bloodaxe in the UK: After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Come, Thief (2012); and The Beauty (2015). In 2008 Bloodaxe and Newcastle University published Jane Hirshfield's Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry. She has also published two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), and has edited and served as co-translator for several acclaimed and much reprinted volumes collecting the work of women poets of the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Scribner's, 1988; Vintage Classics, 1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (HarperCollins, 1994); and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004). Her own poetry has been translated into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz (among others), who also wrote the introduction for her bestselling Polish Selected Poems, published by Znak in 2002. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, at Bennington College and elsewhere, and has held many residencies. She has had fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.