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Featured Poet

Featured Illinois Poet

Although this website's objective is simply to promote the art of poetry, its special focus is the rich bounty of work created by our state's poets past and present. Through features on the work of Illinois poets, the site will highlight the poetic legacy of Illinois and showcase the bevy of fine poets currently writing within the state.

Biographical Note

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch, a Chicago native and MacArthur Fellow, has just published The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, which brings together thirty-five years of poetry from seven previous collections, including For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and Special Orders (2008).  He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, and Poet's Choice (2006).  He edits the series "The Writer's World" (Trinity University Press).  He has edited Theodore Roethke's Selected Poems (2005) and co-edited The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008).  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years and now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Edward Hirsch's Poems

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