Podcast summary

Discussing Hebrew, Polish, and Irish writers, four of the world's best known poets examine how local politics, national realities, and cultural traditions affect great literary traditions.

Participant(s) Bio

Edward Hirsch is internationally acclaimed as a poet and critic. Among his six books of poems are For the Sleepwalkers, which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and most recently, Lay Back the Darkness. His prose books include Poet's Choice, the national best-seller How to Read a Poem; Fall in Love with Poetry, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration.

Among his many honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Eavan Boland has published eight volumes of poetry, including Against Love Poetry, In a Time of Violence, and An Origin Like Water. She is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. Boland is the winner of the Lannan Award for Poetry and lives in Dublin and Stanford, California.

Peter Cole's most recent book of poems is Things on Which I've Stumbled. His many volumes of translations include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 1950-1492; J'Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai; and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005, by Taha Muhammad Ali. Cole is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2007. He lives in Jerusalem.

Adam Zagajewski's books of poetry in English include Mysticism for Beginners, Tremor, and Without End. He is also the author of a memoir, Another Beauty, and the prose collections Two Cities and Solitude and Solidarity. Among his honors and awards are a fellowship from the Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberté, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Neustadt Literary Prize. He is professor of literature at the University of Chicago. He lives in Krakow, Poland and Chicago.

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