Adam Kirsch

Adam Kirsch (born 1976) is an American poet, literary critic, and editor. Born in Los Angeles, he earned a BA from Harvard University and has developed a career that moves between poetry, criticism, biography, and essays on literature, culture, and Jewish intellectual life. His work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Kirsch’s poetry is often associated with formal craft, including meter and rhyme. His first collection, The Thousand Wells, received the New Criterion Poetry Prize. The catalogued Emblems of the Passing World is a sequence of poems responding to August Sander’s photographs of people in Germany between the world wars; it brings historical subjects and photographic images into conversation. His other poetry collections include Invasions and The Discarded Life.

As a critic and nonfiction writer, Kirsch has written books including The Wounded Surgeon, Why Trilling Matters, The People and the Books, and The Blessing and the Curse. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016 for general nonfiction and has worked as an editor at The Wall Street Journal. His 2024 book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice examines the contemporary political use of the term “settler colonialism.”