Both Zen and art-making are practices of transformation. They broaden seeing, soften understanding, and expand the field of our actions and speech.
Join Zen Peacemakers on Tuesday, September 29th for a second conversation between poet Jane Hirshfield and Geoff Shoun O’ Keeffe as they continue the dialogue about art-making and activism, the ways that creative heart-mind increases compassion, and the perennial question of meeting the difficult with tenderness, humility, and courage.
During the program, Jane will also read some of her poems and there will be time for question and answer with the group as a whole.
Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield
September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern
Jane Hirshfield, who received lay-ordination in the Soto Zen lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi in 1979, is among American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere and interconnection. Her ten poetry books include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), holding fifty years of poems. She’s the author also of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s heart-mind and four books presenting world poets from the deep past.
Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Arts & Letters Award. In 2017, she founded Poets for Science, an interactive traveling installation that’s appeared across the country at universities, museums, research centers, and the National Academy of Sciences. A 2026 Visiting Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. > learn more
Watch the previous conversation from April 24, 2024 in the Zen Peacemakers Library:
"Everything Changes, Everything is Connected, Pay Attention”: The Poetry of Jane Hirshfield
