Vol. 42, No. 9 / May 2024

Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and the poetry editor of The New Criterion. He is also  an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, as well as the author of ten books, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (W. W. Norton, 2016), Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), and, most recently, Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?: Essays (Yale, 2019). His latest poetry collection is The Discarded Life (Red Hen, 2022). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016 and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University from 2004–05. In 2013 he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and he was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Prize for Book Reviewing. He has taught literature and writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

The first of his three collections of poetry, The Thousand Wells: Poems, was the 2002 winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. He has subsequently served as a New Criterion Poetry Prize judge. 

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Adam Kirsch