Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.
Hirshfield is also the author of Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997); and an e-book on Matsuo Bashō, titled The Heart of Haiku (2011). She has also edited and co-translated books with Mariko Aratani and Robert Bly.