Reviewers describe Jane Hirshfield's writing as "radiant and passionate," "ethically aware" and "insightful and eloquent."

Rogue Valley audiences will have a chance to hear Hirshfield read from her work when the Friends of the Ashland Library and the Ashland Chamber of Commerce sponsor her visit to Southern Oregon on Monday, Oct. 9.

Hirshfield was born and raised in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton in 1973 in its first graduating class to include women. After college, she worked for a year on a farm, then moved to Northern California where she studied at the San Francisco Zen Center. She now makes her home in California.

One of her six books of poetry, "Given Sugar, Given Salt," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In addition to her poetry collections, Hirshfield is a freelance writer and translator.

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Speaking of Hirshfield's writing, the poet Rosanna Warren said: "Her poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature ... Clause by clause, image by image, in language at once mysterious and commonplace, Hirshfield's poems clear a space for reflection and change."

The American Poet magazine wrote, "Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets."

The Antioch Review said, "Jane Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. Her poems are meant to endure."

Hirshfield has won a number of awards for her writing and in 2004 was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor shared by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

Academy of American Poets; Columbia University's Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California's Poetry Medal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, four of the past six volumes of The Best American Poetry, and many other publications, and has been featured numerous times on Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac program, as well as in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor shared by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

Hirshfield has been a lecturer in creative writing at the University of San Francisco, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She serves as a member of the faculties of numerous writers conferences and in-school programs, including California Poets in the Schools, 1979-85, and the Port Townsend and Napa Valley Writers Conferences. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and translator, Hirshfield has been Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Vermont.