New spring 2023 location! This event will take place in the breezeway the University of Arizona Poetry Center, an indoor/outdoor space.  All are welcome! 

Join us for monthly poetry discussions, led by docents from the UA Poetry Center. The event is free, and no preparation or knowledge of poetry is necessary to participate.  A reading packet will be shared.  For anyone who enjoys poetry or learning more about poets in a conversational setting, this informal gathering includes many opportunities to contribute to the conversation and ask questions. It is also a great way to meet people in the community who have similar interests.

This discussion will feature a discussion of the work of Jane Hirshfield, who visits the Poetry Center for a reading on April 13th.  Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, writer, and translator whose fifteen published books, nine of them verse, have received numerous honors. Her poetry books include Ledger, The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her next book will be The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, September 2023). Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award,  The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded Poets For Science, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 Hirshfield was appointed Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland.