Edward Hirsch (1989 Fellow, 2019 Resident) presents The Heart of American Poetry: “The Three intertwined viruses, three powerful threats to the republic—Covid 19, the virus of racism, individual and systemic, and the authoritarian threat to democracy—have led me to reappraise the place of poetry in our culture, the work that it does, and how poetry contributes to the American experiment, what it means to American experience and life. I will try to characterize the New World poetry of democracy and what American poetry contributes to world literature.”

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems and six books of prose about poetry including How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), The Living Fire, New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that the New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He was a Rome Prize Fellow in 1988–89 and returned as the William B. Hart Poet in Residence in fall 2018. Hirsch is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.