Partnering with Poets for Science founder, poet and environmental spokesperson Jane Hirshfield, the Wick Poetry Center joined the marchers at the Teach-In on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Today, Poets for Science is both an exhibit and a movement exploring the connections between poetry and science.
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Jane Hirshfield’s nine collections of poetry include Ledger (Knopf, 2020); The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long-listed for the National Book Award; Come, Thief; After (shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize); Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); The Lives of the Heart; and The October Palace. She is also the author of two now-classic books of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015) and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past.
Hirshfield’s interest in science and the ecological world has long infused her poems. She has been artist in residence for both a neuroscience program at UCSF and an experimental forest in Oregon’s Western Cascades. Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor previously held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, home to the award-winning Traveling Stanzas project, is one of the premier university poetry centers in the country. It is a national leader for the range, quality, and innovative outreach in the community.
The mission of Traveling Stanzas is to bring poetry to everyday lives by fostering meaningful conversations and encouraging new voices. The program offers people moments of pause to slow down and reflect on their lives, their communities, and to participate in a shared creative experience.
Traveling Stanzas is a project of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University in collaboration with Visual Communication Design students and alumni. The purpose of Traveling Stanzas is to facilitate a global conversation through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. Learn more about the Traveling Stanzas project by visiting travelingstanzas.com.