Brenda Wineapple is the author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, a winner of the Washington Arts Club National Award for arts writing, and a New York Times Notable Book; it was also named best nonfiction of 2008 in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Economist. Her other books include Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the Ambassador Award of the English-speaking Union for Best Biography and the Boston Book Club's Julia Ward Howe Prize. Wineapple is director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York and teaches in the MFA programs at the New School and Columbia University. She lives in New York.
Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. His second collection, Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent poetry collections include The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Special Orders, Lay Back the Darkness, On Love, Earthly Measures, and The Night Parade.
He is also the author of the prose books The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Responsive Reading, and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which poet Garrett Hongo called “the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection” and “a wonderful book for laureate and layman both.” Most recently, Hirsch published Poet’s Choice, which collects two years’ worth of his weekly essay letters from the Washington Post Book World.
Hirsch’s honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he lives in New York.
