Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere, interconnection, and the alliance of poetry and the sciences. A practitioner of Soto Zen for almost 50 years, she received lay-ordination in 1979 in the San Francisco Zen Center lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University’s Translation Center Award. Author of the newly published The Asking: New and Selected Poems, nine previous poetry collections, and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s infrastructure and craft, she also edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Tricycle, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

James Shaheen, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, began his Buddhist practice in the mid-1990s, studying with teachers from a number of Buddhist traditions. He is particularly interested in Buddhism’s growth in the West and its applicability to Western politics, culture, and everyday life. He has been with Tricycle for nearly 25 years.