Author/Poet: Jennifer Michael Hecht

A book discussion about the many ways we use poetry in our daily lives

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. Her most recent book is The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) a guide to using poetry to find meaning, invoke awe, and rest in some clarity of mind. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. In Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale University Press, 2013) she scrutinizes the moral status of suicide. Her The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007), brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life.  Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”  Her books have been translated into many languages.
For more information, visit the Katonah Poetry Series website here. 

“The Wonder Paradox takes the reader by the hand and patiently, gently, and with great care introduces us to the delights, joys, and wisdom of poetry. If Jennifer Michael Hecht is starting a movement—sign me up! Finally, here is a party worth joining.” — Ilya Kaminsky

“Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World – a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.” — Billy Collins

Co-Sponsored by Katonah Village Library and Katonah Poetry Series