Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. Her father was a clothing manufacturer and her mother was a secretary. Even as a young child, she knew she wanted to be a writer and poet when she grew up and recalls writing a sentence to that effect when prompted by a grade school teacher asking the children about future careers. The first book she bought for herself at age nine was a collection of haiku poetry, evidence of not only her early interest in that genre but also in Japanese writing and culture. Hirshfield graduated from a girls' school in New York and then went on to Princeton from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1973. Also in 1973, she published her first poem, but, in an unlikely move, she put aside her writing for the next eight years to study at the San Francisco Zen...