Award-Winning Poet Edward Hirsch to Read for Katonah Poetry Series

On Sunday, November 15, the Katonah Poetry Series and Katonah Village Library are honored to present award-winning poet and author Edward Hirsch. 

 “The trademarks of his poems are things I strive to bring to my own writing: to be intimate but restrained, to be tender without being sentimental, to witness life without flinching, and above all, to isolate and preserve those details of our existence so often overlooked, so easily forgotten, so essential to our souls.” –Jhumpa Lahiri

Hirsch’s poetry collections include For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems 1972–2010, and Gabriel (2014). Since then, Hirsch has published numerous poetry collections, most recently, The Heart of American Poetry (2022) and Stranger by Night (2020). Hirsch is also the author of the nonfiction book My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (2025). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1997. His numerous other awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. 

Hirsch’s interest in mining the past and traditions of poetry extends to his critical work, which includes How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2003) Hirsch’s encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, poets, and poetics served him during his tenure at the Washington Post, where he penned the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column. On his work as a critic, “I write for both initiated and uninitiated readers of poetry. I like to spread the word ... My notion was to make links and connections, to bring forward unknown poets, and to help people to think about poetry in a somewhat deeper way.”