Adam Kirsch

Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles and earned his BA from Harvard. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Discarded Life (2022), Emblems of the Passing World: Poems After Photographs by August Sanders (2015), Invasions (2008), and The Thousand Wells (2002), selected for the New Criterion Poetry Prize.  

Kirsch is known as an exacting formalist; he frequently works with traditional values and techniques such as meter and rhyme. As a critic, Kirsch is similarly interested in conserving traditional poetry and poetics. His books of criticism include The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century (2020), The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century (2017), The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016), Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas (2014), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (2008), and The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformations in Six American Poets (2005). He has also written biographical studies, including Why Trilling Matters (2011) and Benjamin Disraeli (2008). He edited Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (2019).

Kirsch’s poems have also appeared in many magazines including Paris Review, Partisan Review, the Formalist, Harvard Review, and the New Criterion. His honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Princeton University. He is a former poetry critic at the New Republic and a former contributing editor at Tablet. He regularly writes for a number of publications, including the New Republic, the Atlantic, Slate, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, and Poetry magazine. 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 at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. He is an editor of the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Review section.

Kirsch lives in New York City.