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In 2019, Hirshfield was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Hirshfield's work consistently explores themes of social justice and environmental awareness, specifically the belief that natural world and human world are inextricably linked. Mark A. Eaton noted in The Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Hirshfield's work recognizes the full breadth and responsibilities of humans' transactions with the earth, not just the intimacies." Donna Seaman, reviewing Hirshfield's ninth collection, Ledger, described Hirshfield’s “carefully weighted tone as she reckons with our constant subtraction of Earth’s life forces and incessant addition of carbon to our atmosphere, acid to our seas.” Hirshfield has become an increasingly visible spokesperson for peace, justice, and environmental issues. In a review of her seventh collection,Come, Thief, Afaa M. Weaver wrote that her poems "find a middle ground between the larger landscape of political conflict and the personal landscape of our need to connect with one another." Hirshfield's voice as a spokesperson for peace, justice, and environmental issues has become increasing visible, with her work concluding the Library of America's "War No More: Three Hundred Years of American Antiwar and Peace Writing" and appearing in many other collections of poems of social awareness.

In 2017, Hirshfield organized a Poets For Science component for the main D.C. March for Science held on Earth Day, April 22, on the Washington Mall. As a main rally speaker, she read "On the Fifth Day", a poem protesting the January 24, 2017, removal of scientific information from federal agency websites. The poem appeared on the front page of the Washington Post's Opinion Section a week before the March. Working with the Wick Poetry Center based at Kent State University in Ohio, Hirshfield arranged also for a Poets For Science tent to be part of the teach-in preceding the March, in which scientists and their supporters were invited both to read and to write their own scientifically-grounded poems. Poets For Science activities from the March and into the future are hosted on the Wick Poetry Center's website. Video of Hirshfield's reading at the March for Science.

Hirshfield's work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, many literary journals, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her poems have frequently been read on various National Public Radio programs, and she was featured in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling With Words. An interview with Hirshfield on the occasion of the publication of "The Beauty" and "Ten Windows" in March 2015 was published in SF Gate. Extended conversations with fellow poets Ilya Kaminsky (The Paris Review) , Kaveh Akbar (The American Poetry Review) , and Mark Doty (Guernica) appeared in conjunction with the publication of Ledger in 2020.

Though never a full-time academic, Hirshfield has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, The Bennington Writing Seminars, and as the Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. She was the Hellman Visiting Artist in 2013 in the Neuroscience Department at University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University's 2016 Mohr Visiting Professor in Poetry. She has also taught at many writers conferences, including Bread Loaf and the Napa Valley Writers Conference and has served as both core and associate faculty in the Bennington Master of Fine Arts Writing Seminars. Hirshfield appears frequently in literary festivals both in America and abroad, including the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the National Book Festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Poetry International (London, UK), the China Poetry Festival (Xi'an, China), and the Second International Gathering of the Poets [Kraków, Poland]. She has received numerous residency fellowships, including from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Civitella Ranieri, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, a former guest editor of The Pushcart Prize Anthology and an advisory editor at Orion and Tricycle.

Hirshfield's poems and life increasingly reflect her long-standing interest in biology, as well as physics and other fields of science. She was the 2013 Hellman Visiting Artist in the Neuroscience department at The University of California, San Francisco, a program "created to foster dialogue between scientists, caregivers, patients, clinicians and the public regarding creativity and the brain." In 2010, she was the Blue River Fellow in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest's Long Term Ecological Reflection project, whose goal is to track scientific research and artistic responses to the same sites for 200 years.

Hirshfield served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012-2017).

Hirshfield's nine books of poetry have received numerous awards. Her fifth book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and her sixth collection, After, was shortlisted for the "T.S. Eliot Prize" (UK) and named a 'best book of 2006' by The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. Her eighth collection, The Beauty, was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a 'best book of 2015' by The San Francisco Chronicle. She has written two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. The Ink Dark Moon, her co-translation of the work of the two foremost women poets of classical-era Japan, was instrumental in bringing tanka (a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form) to the attention of American poets. She has edited four books collecting the work of poets from the past and is noted as being "part of a wave of important scholarship then seeking to recover the forgotten history of women writers." She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, the Academy of American Poets' 2004 Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2005, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry in 2012.

David Baker described Hirshfield as "one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets" and U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan called Hirshfield "a true person of letters". Hirshfield's poetry has often been described as sensuous, insightful, and clear. In the award citation for Hirshfield's 2004 Academy of American Poets' Fellowship, Rosanna Warren noted

An article in Critical Survey of Poetry (2002) summarized the effect of Zen on Hirshfield's work:

For all her focus on insight and the unknowable, as early as 1995, Stephen Yenser noted in The Yale Review Hirshfield's interest in the empirical. "The probably unspeakeable plenitude of the empirical world: Jane Hirshfield's poems recognize it at every point." In a Booklist starred review, Donna Seaman has more recently noted Hirshfield's "meticulous reasoning, including a striking meditation on the paradoxical richness of spareness that can serve as her ars poetica."

In 1979, Hirshfield received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Jane Hirshfield (born 24 February 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator.