Edward Hirsch is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. A longtime teacher in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, he is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in New York City.